This Boston Globe article is a rare exception for the MSM. It is an honest and complete review of the evidence showing Bobby Kennedy never bought into the lone assassin, “Oswald did it” scenario. Not on 11/22/63, and not in 1968, when he was running for president in California, just before he himself was killed under suspicious circumstances.
~Jim DiEugenio
This Boston Globe article is a rare exception for the MSM. It is an honest and complete review of the evidence showing Bobby Kennedy never bought into the lone assassin, “Oswald did it” scenario. Not on 11/22/63, and not in 1968, when he was running for president in California, just before he himself was killed under suspicious circumstances.
~Jim DiEugenio
How far the Warren Report has fallen in public estimation is an almost humorous subject. When it was first issued in the fall of 1964, the report was met with almost universal acclaim as an historically unquestionable document. All branches of the media – the press, television, periodicals and radio – accepted it with almost no reservations. Perhaps because none of the commentators had read the nearly 15,000 pages of accompanying evidence, which was not published until a month later. To show just how strange this reception was, and how lacking in rigor the media examination was, CBS prepared a two-hour documentary on the Warren Report the day it was published! Clearly, this show was being prepared in advance of the release of the report. In other words, CBS had accepted the Warren Report without reading it. Or, someone in the government passed them a copy before anyone else had it.
Yet, this mass propaganda deployment did not hold. Within three years, the majority of Americans now doubted the main tenets of the Warren Report. And that figure has never dipped below a majority in the nearly fifty years since. Which is a tribute to both the work of the critical community and the good sense of the American people. Because the members of the Warren Commission have never let up in their attempts to reinculcate the public with their fallacious verdict based upon, at best, incomplete evidence.
For instance, when Oliver Stone’s film JFK was released, David Belin appeard at the National Press Club to criticize the film. (Click here for that appearance https://www.c-span.org/video/?25215-1/kennedy-assassination-controversy). When the late Dr. Charles Crenshaw, who was in residence at Parkland Hospital in 1963, published his book Conspiracy of Silence suggesting something was awry with the autopsy of President Kennedy, Belin appeared in the pages of the Dallas Morning News to denounce his book. Years earlier, Commission attorneys David Slawson and Wesley Liebeler communicated with the Justice Department to construct a limited medical examination that would hinder Jim Garrison’s investigation in New Orleans. And as Pat Speer has shown, in all probability, before Arlen Specter passed away, he got in contact with New York TImes journalist Phil Shenon to coax him into writing his limited hangout book, A Cruel and Shocking Act. (Click here for our review)
Wesley Liebeler, Arlen Specter and David Belin have all since passed away. So today, Commission counsel Howard Willens is the most active participant in sustaining the verdict of the Warren Commission into the new millennium. In 2013, he wrote an ill-titled volume called History Will Prove Us Right. The review at this site by Martin Hay was so scathing, Willens actually replied to it on his personal web site. (Click here for Hay’s review http://www.ctka.net/reviews/willens.html, and here for Willens’ reply http://howardwillens.com/jfk_history/conspiracy-communitys-response-book/) Willens’ reply was so weak and unfounded that Martin had little trouble demolishing it also. (Click here http://themysteriesofdealeyplaza.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-watchman-waketh-but-in-vain-howard.html) Apparently, Willens did not learn his lesson. Or he is a glutton for punishment. He has sallied forward again. This time he has joined forces with survivng member Richard Mosk.
Attorneys Willens’ and Richard Mosk’s latest defense appears in, of all places, The American Scholar. This essay on their work for the Warren Commission they served on is more notable for what they omit from the official record than what they include. “What the critics often forget or ignore,” they write, “is that since 1964, several government agencies have also looked at aspects of our work” (American Scholar, Summer, 2016, p. 59). As if the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) had reviewed and applauded the commission’s work. Indeed, they did look at it. But rather than plaudits, they issued stinging rebukes, principally for the commission’s having been rolled by J. Edgar Hoover, and to a lesser extent, by the CIA and the Secret Service.
“It must be said that the FBI generally exhausted its resources in confirming its case against Oswald as the lone assassin,” the HSCA concluded, “a case that Director J. Edgar Hoover, at least, seemed determined to make within 24 hours of the of the assassination.”1 In essence, the experienced investigators concluded that Hoover had divined the solution to the crime before the investigation began, and then his agents confirmed the boss’s epiphany. The intimidated commission went right along. And with good reason, only part of which Mr. Willens tells.
He admits that the “FBI had originally opposed the creation of the Warren Commission,” and that Hoover “ordered investigations of commission staff members.” But he doesn’t reveal that Hoover deployed one of his favorite dirty tricks to deal not only with lowly support staffers, such as Mr. Willens, but also with the heralded commissioners themselves. “[D]erogatory information pertaining to both Commission members and staff was brought to Mr. Hoover’s attention,” the Church Committee reported.2 (emphasis added)
Willens and Mosk also forgot to mention that Hoover had a personal spy on the Warren Commission, then Rep. Gerald Ford, who tattled on Commissioners who were (justifiably) skeptical of the Bureau’s work. “Ford indicated he would keep me thoroughly advised as to the activities of the Commission,” FBI executive Cartha DeLoach wrote in a once secret memo. “He stated this would have to be done on a confidential basis, however he thought it should be done.”3 At the bottom of the memo, Hoover scrawled, “Well handled.”4 The success of Hoover’s machinations was obvious to subsequent government investigators.
The HSCA’s chief counsel, Notre Dame Law Professor Robert Blakey, an experienced criminal investigator and prosecutor, was impressed with neither the Commission’s vigor nor its independence. “What was significant,” Blakey wrote, “was the ability of the FBI to intimidate the Commission, in light of the Bureau’s predisposition on the questions of Oswald’s guilt and whether there had been a conspiracy. At a January 27 [1964] Commission meeting, there was another dialogue [among Warren Commissioners]:
“John McCloy: ‘… the time is almost overdue for us to have a better perspective of the FBI investigation than we now have … We are so dependent on them for our facts … .’
“Commission counsel J. Lee Rankin: ‘Part of our difficulty in regard to it is that they have no problem. They have decided that no one else is involved … .’
“Senator Richard Russell: ‘They have tried the case and reached a verdict on every aspect.’
“Senator Hale Boggs: ‘You have put your finger on it.’ (Closed Warren Commission meeting transcipt.)”5
Testifying before the HSCA, the Commission’s chief counsel J. Lee Rankin shamefully admitted, “Who could protest against what Mr. Hoover did back in those days?”6 Apparently not the President’s commissioners. The HSCA’s Blakey also reported that, “When asked if he was satisfied with the (Commission’s) investigation that led to the (no conspiracy) conclusion, Judge Burt Griffin said he was not.”7 Moreover, author Gus Russo reported that Griffin also admitted that, “We spent virtually no time investigating the possibility of conspiracy. I wish we had.”8
Thus, despite their clear misgivings, rather than truly investigate, the Commissioners bowed to the notoriously corrupt and imperious Bureau chief. This policy had serious repercussions when the Commission confronted two key issues: published claims that Lee Harvey Oswald had been an FBI informant, and the possibility Jack Ruby had a relationship with organized crime.
“The Commission did not investigate Hoover or the FBI, and managed to avoid the appearance of doing so,” HSCA investigators determined. “It ended up doing what the members had agreed they could not do: Rely mainly on the FBI’s denial of the allegations (that Oswald had been a Bureau informant).”9 Hoover merely sent the Commission his signed affidavit declaring that Oswald was not an informant, and he also “sent over 10 additional affidavits from each FBI agent who had had contact with Oswald.”10 And with those self-exonerating denials, the case was closed.
About Jack Ruby: in 1964 the FBI had his phone records, yet failed to spot Ruby’s obvious, and atypical, pattern of calls to known Mafiosi in the weeks leading up to the assassination. After performing the rudimentary task of actually analyzing those calls, the HSCA determined that, if not a sworn member of La Cosa Nostra, Ruby had close links to numerous Mafiosi.11 Thus the HSCA found that the Commission was wrong in concluding that, “the evidence does not establish a significant link between Ruby and organized crime.”12
The list of Commission shortcomings the HSCA assembled is not short. A brief summary of them runs some 47 pages in the Bantam Books version of the report (pp. 289-336), which outlines what required much of the 500 pages of HSCA volume XI to cover (available on-line).13 “The evidence indicates that facts which may have been relevant to, and would have substantially affected, the Warren Commission’s investigation were not provided by the agencies (FBI and the CIA). Hence, the Warren Commission’s findings may have been formulated without all of the relevant information.”14 The Church Committee said that the problem was that “… the Commission was perceived as an adversary by both Hoover and senior FBI officials.” “Such a relationship,” Committee observed, “was not conducive to the cooperation necessary for a thorough and exhaustive investigation.”15
But the FBI did more than just withhold evidence from the Commission. Although he mentions that the FBI destroyed a note Oswald wrote to Agent Hosty and withheld that information from the Commission, Mr. Willens doesn’t mention that Agent Hosty reported that his own personnel file, and other FBI files, had been falsified.16 Nor that author Curt Gentry learned from assistant FBI director William Sullivan that there were other JFK documents at the Bureau that had been destroyed.17
Although too numerous to explore here, American Scholar readers should understand that legitimate questions persist about issues Messrs. Willens and Mosk consider settled. These include the notorious Single Bullet Theory and JFK’s hapless autopsy,18 to name but two. But if the authors cannot even be completely honest with what the HSCA and Church Committee wrote about them, then should one trust them with those two radioactive issues?
1 House Select Committee on Assassinations Final Report, p. 128. On-line at: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=800#relPageId=158&tab=page.
2 In: Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, Book V, p. 47, on-line at: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=1161#relPageId=53&tab=page. Also cited by: Curt Gentry. J. Edgar Hoover – The Man and His Secrets. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991, p. 549.
3 “Ford Told FBI of Skeptics on Warren Commission”, By Joe Stephens, Washington Post Staff Writer, Friday, August 8, 2008. On-line at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/07/AR2008080702757_pf.html.
4 See copy of actual memo at Mary Ferrell: http://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=61488#relPageId=100.
5 In: R. Blakey and R. Billings. Fatal Hour – The Assassination of President Kennedy by Organized Crime. New York: Berkley Books, 1992, p. 29. This testimony was also published in: Mark North. Act of Treason. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1991, p. 515-516.
6 House Select Committee on Assassinations, Vol. XI, p. 49, on-line at: http://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=83#relPageId=55&tab=page.
7 Blakey and R. Billings. Fatal Hour – The Assassination of President Kennedy by Organized Crime. New York: Berkley Books, 1992, p. 94.
8 Gus Russo. Live by the Sword. Baltimore: Bancroft Press, 1998, p. 374.
9 HSCA, Vol IX, p. 41. On-line at: http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol11/pdf/HSCA_Vol11_WC_2_FBI_CIA.pdf.
10 HSCA, Vol IX, p. 41. On-line at: http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol11/pdf/HSCA_Vol11_WC_2_FBI_CIA.pdf.
11 See excellent discussion in: House Select Committee on Assassinations Final Report, p. 148-156, on-line at: http://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=800#relPageId=178&tab=page.
12 Warren Report, p. 801. On-line at: http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-report/appendix-16.html.
13 http://www.history-matters.com/archive/contents/hsca/contents_hsca_vol11.htm.
14 HSCA, Vol. XI, p. 59. On-line at: http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol11/pdf/HSCA_Vol11_WC_2_FBI_CIA.pdf.
15 In: Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations (Church Committee), Book V, p. 47, on-line at: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=1161#relPageId=53&tab=page.
16 James P. Hosty, Jr. Assignment: Oswald. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996, pp. 178-180, 184-185, 243-244.
17 Curt Gentry. J. Edgar Hoover – The Man and His Secrets. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991, p. 546, footnote.
18 The Chairman of the Forensics Panel of the HSCA, former New York Coroner Michael Baden, MD, has written, “Where bungled autopsies are concerned, President Kennedy’s is the exemplar.” See Baden, Michael M., Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner. New York: Ivy Books, published by Ballantine Books, 1989, p. 5. See also, Larry Sturdivan, The JFK Myths, chapter 10, “Bungled Autopsy,” St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, pp. 185-220.
Established in 1976 to investigate the assassinations of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy, the HSCA issued its final report in 1979. It found that there was a “probable conspiracy” in the JFK case.
The following is a summary of their findings (source: National Archives):
The committee had other troubling conclusions: Neither Lee Harvey Oswald nor Jack Ruby were the loners depicted by the Warren Commission, and were involved in relationships that could have matured into a conspiracy; Lee Harvey Oswald was connected to David Ferrie and Guy Banister- two conspirators according to Jim Garrison; Jack Ruby was in fact connected to the Mafia (an issue sidestepped by the Warren Commission); Marina Oswald’s incriminating statements against her husband were found to be lacking in credibility; they were inclined to believe Sylvia Odio who asserted that she was visited before the assassination by two Cuban exiles and a Leon Oswald in an attempt to portray Oswald as unbalanced and hostile to JFK. Her testimony was rejected by the Warren Commission even though she had related the event before the assassination; The Lopez Report established that someone was impersonating Oswald seven weeks before the assassination in Mexico City in an attempt to get a visa to travel to Cuba and that the CIA had tampered with the electronic evidence.
While the HSCA asked the Justice Department to re-investigate the case- it chose to only look at the acoustical evidence, which it rejected based on science that itself is also contested.
For those who have used this final point to argue that the Warren Commission got it right and discard all the other incriminating findings- It will prove useful to read what the key members of the Committee had to say:
Gaeton Fonzi – Church and HSCA investigator
Gaeton Fonzi was interviewed a number of times after the investigations. The information he brought forward in his 1993 book, The Last Investigation was considered credible and explosive. Fonzi described an exchange he had with Arlen Specter (the Warren Commission’s principal proponent of the Single Bullet theory) where he described him as being unnerved when discussing the Commission’s evidence. He also revealed how Cuban exile group Alpha 66 leader Antonio Veciana exposed his CIA handler Maurice Bishop (a cover name for top ranking CIA officer David Atlee Phillips) who he witnessed meeting with Oswald. He discussed how close contacts of CIA officer David Sanchez Morales heard him admit a conspiracy in the assassination. He described how the HSCA was stonewalled by the CIA. He also complained about second Commission head Robert Blakey’s submissive relationship with the CIA.
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| Gaeton Fonzi(mid-1970s) |
In a speech in 1998 while receiving the Mary Ferrell JFK Lancer Pioneer Award he had this to say about the Warren Commission: Is there any doubt that the Warren Commission deliberately set out not to tell the American people the truth?
There is a brief glimpse, an illustration of the level at which that deceit was carried out, in an incident that occurred during the Warren Commission’s investigation. Commission chairman Earl Warren himself, with then Representative Gerald Ford at his side, was interviewing a barman, Curtis LaVerne Crafard. Crafard had worked at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club. But he was seized by the FBI as he was hightailing it out of town the day after the assassination, having told someone, “They are not going to pin this on me!”
In the interview, Warren asks Crafard what he did before he was a bartender.
“I was a Master sniper in the Marine Corps,” Crafard answered.
The next question that Warren immediately asked was: “What kind of entertainment did they have at the club?”
In a 1999 interview he gave to Michael Corbin, Fonzi contradicted Robert Blakey by stating that the HSCA investigation also lacked thoroughness. He also wonders out loud whether the “…the Government itself or a power elite within the government was a controlling element here”.
He opined that the failed Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis followed by the cessation of secret anti-Castro operations were probably a guiding motivation for operatives linked to the JM Wave CIA station in Miami to remove the President and which end up dovetailing with Oswald’s movements in 1963.
He makes the claim that Oswald was an agent of the intelligence establishment who was coded as a leftist. He was not a lone nut. He believes that he was also a patsy who did not fire a shot and that Dealey Plaza became a shooting gallery on November 22nd 1963.
He describes also how David Phillips was not only seen with Oswald by Antonio Veciana, but how a lot of the cover-up and misinformation campaigns about Oswald were linked to him.
He concludes the interview by stating :“there is no doubt that it was a coup d’état”!
Dan Hardway and Edwin Lopez – HSCA “staffers”
(authors of appendix 13 of the HSCA Report, “Oswald, the CIA and Mexico City”, also known as the Lopez Report)
History Matters provides an excellent introduction about this report only released in 1996:
The “thirteenth appendix” to the HSCA Report on the JFK assassination is a staff report entitled “Oswald, the CIA, and Mexico City.” This report describes what the Committee learned about Lee Oswald’s trip to Mexico City less than two months prior to the assassination. Questions it grapples with include why the CIA was apparently unable to obtain a photo of Oswald from any of its photographic surveillance stations (and instead produced a photo of a “Mystery Man” who was clearly not Oswald), whether Oswald was impersonated in Mexico City, and what credibility to attach to any of the indications and allegations of Communist conspiracy emanating from that city.
The so-called “Lopez Report,” written by staffers Dan Hardway and Edwin Lopez, was released in its present form in 1996, but remains redacted in several places. It is a good starting place for grappling with some of the many mysteries of the Mexico City affair. Newly released files have provided new information not present in this report. The LBJ taped phone conversations for instance, include startling corroboration for the claim that audio intercepts of an Oswald impersonator were listened to by FBI agents in Dallas while Oswald was in custody. Declassified testimony of David Phillips, the Tarasoff couple who translated the tapes for the CIA, and others illuminate some areas and deepen the mystery in others.
The “Lopez Report” is a good point of departure for a journey into this mysterious affair.
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| Dan Hardway |
In 2014, for an ARRC conference, both Hardway and Lopez talked about their experience on the HSCA and the report. A lot of focus was put on how they had been making progress in the HSCA investigation until the CIA placed George Joannides as their resource person in charge of supervising the CIA’s interaction with the HSCA. Despite claims that Joannides was impartial, it was confirmed that he was directly involved with the Cuban exile organization called the DRE in 1963. Oswald had direct interaction with the DRE in events that became very public and were used to paint him as a communist. Hardway concludes his speech with:
“The CIA has something to hide; Joannides knew what they had to hide. The CIA knew he knew and knew we did not know who or what he was hiding; Joannides hid what he had to hide.”
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| Edwin Lopez |
Edwin Lopez confirmed the stonewalling and gave examples on how they were being spied on. He referred to the continued holding back of documents as a mess we all needed to work on together.
They also confirmed that they felt that there were either fake phone calls done by an Oswald impostor while he was allegedly in Mexico or at least faked transcripts.
Hardway hypothesizes that because of compartmentalization Phillips and Oswald may have found out on November 22, 1963 that Oswald was a patsy and Phillips received orders to tie the murder to Castro.
In a critique of Phil Shenon’s work written for the AARC in 2015, Dan Hardway expresses the opinion that the CIA is heading to what he calls a limited hang-out by admitting that Oswald may have received guidance from Cuba and that the CIA director at the time, John McCone, was involved in a benign cover-up.
In an interview he gave to Black Op Radio that same year, he recommended The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot, a book which exposes incriminating information about Alan Dulles and William Harvey, who can be seen now as persons of high interest in the case.
In 2015, for a civil action where plaintiff Jefferson Morley, was suing the CIA for access to information, Dan Hardway signed a Sworn Deposition that underscores CIA obfuscation techniques as well as some of his findings during the investigation. The following are some of his statements:
Beginning in May of 1978, the CIA assigned George Joannides to handle liaison with Edwin Lopez and me. In the summer of 1978, Mr. Joannides began to change the way file access was handled. We no longer received prompt responses to our requests for files and what we did receive no longer seemed to provide the same complete files that we had been seeing. The obstruction of our efforts by Mr. Joannides escalated over the summer, finally resulting in a refusal to provide unexpurgated access to files in violation of the Memorandum of Understanding previously agreed to by the HSCA and the CIA;
During the course of the spring and summer of 1978 I had been looking into several areas of research which were actively impeded under Mr. Joannides’s direction. These included back channel communications methods used by the CIA’s Mexico City Station, William Harvey’s Office of Security files and his continuing relationship with certain Mafia figures, the use of an impulse camera to photograph the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City, missing production from one of the photographic installations that covered the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City as well as the impulse camera at the Cuban Consulate, and David Atlee Phillips’ possible involvement in stories about LHO that appeared after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Before our unexpurgated access was cut off by Joannides, I had been able to document links between David Phillips and most of the sources of the disinformation that came out immediately after the assassination about Oswald and his pro-Castro proclivities. I confronted Phillips with those in an interview at our offices on August 24, 1978. Phillips was extremely agitated by that line of questioning, but was forced to admit that many of the sources were not only former assets that he had managed, in the late 50’s and early 1960’s, but were also assets whom he was personally managing in the fall of 1963. Mr. Phillips was asked, but could not explain, why the information that came from anti-Castro Cuban groups and individuals pointing to Cuban connections, all seemed to come from assets that he handled personally, but acknowledged that that was the case.
We have, since 1978, learned that George Joannides was running the propaganda shop at the CIA’s Miami JMWAVE Station in 1963. It is extremely unlikely that Mr. Joannides could have occupied that position and not have known, and worked with, David Atlee Phillips. In addition, in 1963, we now know, George Joannides was the case officer handling the DRE. In 1977 the CIA specifically denied that DRE had a case officer assigned when asked that question by the HSCA.
Robert Tanenbaum – Chief Counsel HSCA
In a Probe Magazine interview in 1993, Tanenbaum explained why he and Richard Sprague resigned from the Commission:
A: In my opinion, Congress never wanted to go forward with these investigations at all. That’s just based upon my having spoken with a lot of the membership of the House as I was asked to do by the Committee, in order to get funding. That’s something I never thought would be an issue before I went down there. They sort of politicized into it with some very distinguished members of Congress who were retiring in 1976, requesting that the Kennedy portion be investigated because they had seen Groden’s presentation of the Zapruder film and were very persuaded by it. Then the Black Caucus got involved and said well, investigate the murder of Dr. King. It was an election year and they said, “Ok, why not? We’ll do that.” But there was no commitment to really do it, unfortunately, which regrettably we found out while we were in the midst of investigating the case. They pulled our budget, they pulled our long-distance phone privileges, our franking privileges, we couldn’t even send out mail. And all of this was happening at a time when we were making some significant headway. So, L. J. may be right with respect to his perception, but at the same time I don’t believe they were ever committed to it. Tip O’Neill, who was the Speaker, was never committed to it. Only many, many years later did he realize that he’d made a tragic mistake.
He also reveals troubling information about David Atlee Phillips:
BT: To the best of my recollection, we found that movie somewhere in the Georgetown library archives. The movie was shocking to me because it demonstrated the notion that the CIA was training, in America, a separate army. It was shocking to me because I’m a true believer in the system and yet there are notorious characters in the system, who are being funded by the system, who are absolutely un-American. And who knows what they would do, eventually. What if we send people to Washington who they can’t deal with? Out comes their secret army? So, I find that to be as contrary to the constitution as you can get.
BT: Oh, yeah. Absolutely! They’re all in the film. They’re all there. But, the fact of the matter is the Committee began to balk at a series of events. The most significant one was when [David Atlee] Phillips came up before the Committee and then had to be recalled because it was clear that he hadn’t told the truth. That had to do with the phony commentary he made about Oswald going to Mexico City on or about October 1st, 1963.
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| Robert Tanenbaum |
BT: As I said, I had never followed the sequence of these events and I wasn’t aware of any of this, before I went to Washington. If you had told me all this before I went, I would have said, “This is madness. Talk to me about reality!” So, Phillips was saying that an individual went to Mexico City on or about October 1st and the CIA was claiming this was Lee Harvey Oswald, just as the Warren Commission claimed. However, the following occurred: “Oswald” goes to the Russian Embassy and identifies himself as Lee Henry Oswald. He wants to fake everybody out by changing his middle name. There were tapes of what he said because the CIA was bugging the Embassy the same as they were doing to the U.S. Embassy, according to Phillips. And the CIA was photographing people going in and out of the Embassy, the same as they were doing to the U.S. (We found out, from our own sources that the CIA had a contract employee named Lee Henry Oswald, in their files.) Phillips testimony was that there was no photograph of “Oswald” because the camera equipment had broken down that day and there was no audio tape of “Oswald’s” voice because they recycled their tapes every six or seven days. The problem with his story was, we had obtained a document, it was from the desk of J. Edgar Hoover, it was dated November 23rd, 1963, the very next day after the assassination. This document was a memo to all FBI supervisorial staff stating, in substance, that FBI agents who have questioned Oswald for the past 17 hours approximately, have listened to the tape made on October 1st, by an individual identifying himself as Lee Henry Oswald inside the Russian Embassy, calling on the phone to someone inside the Cuban Embassy and the agents can state unequivocally that the voice on the tape is not the voice of Lee Harvey Oswald, who is in custody.
BT: No. It was a whole separate sequence of events that occurred. But, I wanted to get him back before the Committee so we could confront him with this evidence, because we were in a position to demonstrate that that whole aspect of the Warren Report, and what he had testified to, was untrue. And of course, the Committee was not interested in doing that.
Tanenbaum also vindicated Garrison, incriminated Clay Shaw and shared thoughts about leads that were not followed up on:
BT: Right. We had that information. I was shocked to read that because I remember discounting everything Garrison had said. I had a negative point of view about Garrison based upon all the reportage that had gone on. And then I read all this material that had come out of Helm’s office, that in fact what Garrison had said was true. They were harassing his witnesses, they were intimidating his witnesses. The documents exist. Where they are now, God only knows. It’s a sad commentary on the lack of oversight on the executive intelligence agencies.
BT: That’s correct. The meeting in Clinton and the Clay Shaw connection and the fact that the government was lying about Clay Shaw and the aliases and so on. That the fact that the government and the executive intelligence agencies, not Garrison, were lying about that, was definitely an area to probe to find out what the justification for that was. Why were they involved in all this, if in fact, nothing had occurred? If it was meaningless, why get involved in creating a perjurious situation for a prosecutor in New Orleans? What was he really on to?
BT: Right. The night before the Committee vote, we had sent an investigator to serve him a subpoena. The night of the day he received the subpoena from the Committee is when he was found dead.
BT: Right. We desperately wanted to find out what happened. He was someone who had not been subpoenaed before, certainly not by the Warren Commission. [CTKA note: he was questioned, but not subpoenaed.] And you’re right, he was a key player.
BT: Right. E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis. Interestingly, some of them had been with Castro in the Sierra Maestra during the revolution and became players after the revolution. And then wound up in the Nixon White House as the “plumbers.”
BT: We called Senator Kennedy 20-30 times. He never responded once to an inquiry. I found that to be astounding, because after all, he is a member of this legislative branch of government. He conducts probes, he engages in fact-finding missions. How could he stonewall from his brethren in the other chamber? He could have just simply acknowledged a phone call. How could he know what information we wanted? The fact of the matter was, as a matter of courtesy, we wanted to let him know we knew he was around and we wanted to discuss with him areas that he felt we should look into and get his opinions. We certainly felt that they would be valid. So, we were very disappointed in that regard. Frank Mankiewicz came by as a representative of the Kennedy family, wanted to see whether or not Sprague and I had two or three heads. He told us, interestingly, Bobby Kennedy couldn’t put a sentence together about the assassination, he couldn’t even think about it, he couldn’t focus on it. Which explains, in large measure why the Kennedy family was willing to accept what the Warren Commission said, without concern. The event was so horrific, in and of itself, they really weren’t concerned with bringing someone to justice other than what the Warren Commission had said. In their minds, from what Mankiewicz said, if it wasn’t Oswald-some nonperson-then it was some other nonperson. What difference would it make?
BT: Of course. But, I didn’t pay much attention to it because it didn’t mean anything to me. I’m not moved to any great extent, by what people write in newspapers. They were trying to cause controversy. But, we were on a mission to do a job and nothing some dope in the New York Times or any other newspaper was going to write, that was blatantly untrue, was going to interfere with what we were doing. Whether it was a positive article or a negative article, it didn’t matter.
In 2003, Tanenbaum spoke at the Wecht Conference and what he had to say would certainly give students of American History new insights in the assassination that would not have pleased Earl Warren or Gerald Ford and some of their disciples.
Here are but a few of the points he made:
What I am saying is that from the evidence we produced, there were substantial questions about the assassination …
What I’d like to do very briefly is to explain some of the reasons why, from a prosecutorial point of view, from what our investigation revealed, there was, in my judgment, no case to convict Lee Harvey Oswald of murdering the President …
The assassination was approximately 12:30; at 12:48 a description of a suspect was sent out: “‘white male, approximately thirty, slender build, height five foot ten inches, weight 165 pounds.” Where did that description come from?
And the answer the Warren Commission gives is that this fellow Brennan was… looking up at the Depository window. And he allegedly sees this person – the shooter – Oswald the Warren Commission maintains, and was able to give a description, a miraculous feat … because if he stood up in the window you would only see a partial of his body [his knees] because the first few feet was opaque. [the window was close to the floor]
Whoever the shooter was that was in that window – in that Sniper’s Nest, he was crouched down looking out that window which was raised about 12 inches. At best, if anybody saw anybody in that window, they would have seen a partial of their face, at best.
During a 2015 interview on Len Osanic’s Black Op Radio, he talked about how the Warren Commission did not want look into a conspiracy, including Oswald’s links with intelligence and Ruby’s to the mob and the Dallas Police Department.
Richard Sprague – Chief Counsel
Historians can be illuminated by what this top level insider of impeccable credentials thought about the assassination and the ensuing cover-up from the many interviews he gave.
In the BBC Documentary The Killing of President Kennedy, Sprague related the following about Oswald:
His trip to Russia raised a number of questions that we wanted to get into. For example, when any American went to Russia and renounced his American citizenship and subsequently changed his mind and wanted to come back to this country, upon returning to this country there was a thorough debriefing by the CIA, with one exception as far as we could ascertain- Oswald…
The photographs allegedly of Oswald going into the Cuban embassy as we all know in fact are not photographs of Oswald. Secondly it turns out that those photographs, even if they were of the wrong person, you would expect they would be of a person entering the Cuban embassy but it turns out they are photographs of someone entering the Russian embassy and the question raised how could they so mix up even what building they are talking about. In addition when we inquire where are the photographs you took of the people entering the Cuban embassy the day in question we are told the cameras were not working that day. I want to talk to the camera people I want to find out if that’s true and that’s where we got stopped.
The CIA said they had re-used the tape prior to the assassination of President Kennedy, yet the FBI has a document stating that some of their agents listened to the tape after the assassination of President Kennedy and that the voice on there was not Oswald’s. In addition the CIA presented a transcript of that conversation; we had interviewed the typist who typed it up who said that the transcript presented was not in fact what was typed up by whoever it was who spoke in that conversation. These are areas that I wanted to get into.
From the photographic evidence surrounding the sixth floor window, as well as the grassy knoll, Sprague, Tanenbaum and most of the staff knew Oswald had not fired any shot, they suspected no shots came from the sixth floor “sniper’s nest” window, and knew there had been shots from other points in Dealey Plaza. They knew the single bullet theory was not valid, and strongly suspected there had been a pre-planned crossfire in Dealey Plaza. They were not planning to waste a lot of time reviewing and rehashing the Dealey Plaza evidence, except as it might lead to the real assassins.
They had set up an investigation in Florida and the Keys, of some of the evidence and leads developed in 1967 by Garrison. Gaeton Fonzi was in charge of that part of Sprague’s team. They were going to check out the people in the CIA that had been running and funding the No Name Key group and other anti-Castro groups, e.g., Willaim Seymour, Manuel Garcia Gonzalez, Jerry Patrick Hemming, Loran Hall, Lawrence Howard, and Rolando Masferrer and Carlos Prio Socarras.
This new situation, with Richard Sprague and his team garnering so much knowledge of the CIA’s role in the murder and the cover-up caused the Establishment to face a crisis. They knew they had to do several things to turn the situation around and keep the American public in the dark. Here is what they had to do:
These things all happened. And they fundamentally altered the temperament and goals of the HSCA. It simply was not the same. As many observers think, this was the last, best chance to solve the JFK case.
How did it happen? According to Gaeton Fonzi in The Last Investigation:
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| Richard Sprague |
The key factors that drove Richard Sprague to resign as Chief Counsel of the Assassinations Committee appeared, at the time, to be apparent and on the surface. His proposed use of certain investigative equipment, his demand for an expensive, unrestricted investigation, his refusal to play politics with Chairman Gonzalez – all were apparent grounds for the vociferous criticism which, in the long run, was debilitating to the Committee’s efforts to get on with its job. However, after his resignation and a brief respite from the turmoil of Washington, Sprague was able to view his experience in a broader perspective.” … “If he had it to do over again, he would begin his investigation of the Kennedy assassination by probing “Oswald’s ties to the Central Intelligence Agency.” Recently, I asked Sprague why he had come to that conclusion. “Well,” he said, “when I first thought about it I decided that the House leadership really hadn’t intended for there to be an investigation. The Committee was set up to appease the Black Caucus in an election year. I still believe that was a factor. But when I looked back at what happened, it suddenly became very clear that the problems began only after I ran up against the CIA. That’s when my troubles really started.
In a 2000 interview for Probe Magazine with John Williams, he described his being fired this way:
SPRAGUE: We were just going to do that type of thorough thing. I demanded the records from the CIA, and now there was an abrupt refusal, and I subpoenaed them. At that point, Gonzales, who was Chairman of the Committee, ordered the CIA, or told the CIA that they need not respond to my subpoena, and fired me, and ordered the U.S. Marshals come in and remove me from my office.
WILLIAMS: Oh, so that firing was directly after you had subpoenaed the records from the Central Intelligence Agency.
SPRAGUE: Right. But there’s more involved in it than the timing …
WILLIAMS: Right.
SPRAGUE: … if you checked the record. That came up after that. He ordered my firing. He ordered marshals to remove me from my office in what I’m sure was the first and only time in the history of the United States Congress. The rest of the Committee, backed me to a man and overrode the Chairman, and ordered that I remain, and the marshals were directed to get off.
Of course, that led to Gonzales taking it up in the House of Representatives, and the House backed the rest of the Committee. And he resigned and Stokes came on. [Louis Stokes was the Representative from Ohio. Eds. Note] I’m sure that’s the only time in the history in the United States Congress that in a fight between the Chairman and the Director, that the Chairman got bounced.
But there’s a terrible price paid for that. Every Congressman dreams of being Chairman of a Committee and being all powerful. It ultimately did not sit well with the Congress that a Chairman got ousted …
Robert Blakey – Chief Counsel and staff director 1977-79
While Sprague’s replacement, Robert Blakey, frustrated some investigators for being too trusting of the CIA, he too did not buy the Warren Commission’s final conclusions.
While at first Blakey felt that the HSCA had investigated the CIA enough to absolve them of any role in the assassination, in 2003 in an addendum to an interview with PBS, his opinion evolved. Because he found out that the CIA misled him and the HSCA by bringing George Joannides out of retirement as the CIA liaison with the Committee and hiding the role he had with an anti-Castro group called the DRE which played an important role by its interaction with Oswald:
I am no longer confident that the Central Intelligence Agency co-operated with the Committee. My reasons follow:
The Committee focused, among other things, on (1) Oswald, (2) in New Orleans, (3) in the months before he went to Dallas, and, in particular, (4) his attempt to infiltrate an anti-Castro group, the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil or DRE.
These were crucial issues in the Warren Commission’s investigation; they were crucial issues in the committee’s investigation. The Agency knew it full well in 1964; the Agency knew it full well in 1976-79. Outrageously, the Agency did not tell the Warren Commission or our committee that it had financial and other connections with the DRE, a group that Oswald had direct dealings with!
What contemporaneous reporting is or was in the Agency’s DRE files? We will never know, for the Agency now says that no reporting is in the existing files. Are we to believe that its files were silent in 1964 or during our investigation?
I don’t believe it for a minute. Money was involved; it had to be documented. Period. End of story. The files and the Agency agents connected to the DRE should have been made available to the Commission and the Committee. That the information in the files and the agents who could have supplemented it were not made available to the Commission and the Committee amounts to willful obstruction of justice.
Obviously, too, it did not identify the agent who was its contact with the DRE at the crucial time that Oswald was in contact with it: George Joannides.
During the relevant period, the Committee’s chief contact with the Agency on a day-to-day basis was Scott Breckinridge. (I put aside our point of contact with the office of chief counsel, Lyle Miller) We sent researchers to the Agency to request and read documents. The relationship between our young researchers, law students who came with me from Cornell, was anything but “happy.” Nevertheless, we were getting and reviewing documents. Breckinridge, however, suggested that he create a new point of contact person who might “facilitate” the process of obtaining and reviewing materials. He introduced me to Joannides, who, he said, he had arranged to bring out of retirement to help us. He told me that he had experience in finding documents; he thought he would be of help to us.
I was not told of Joannides’ background with the DRE, a focal point of the investigation. Had I known who he was, he would have been a witness who would have been interrogated under oath by the staff or by the committee. He would never have been acceptable as a point of contact with us to retrieve documents. In fact, I have now learned, as I note above, that Joannides was the point of contact between the Agency and DRE during the period Oswald was in contact with DRE.
That the Agency would put a “material witness” in as a “filter” between the committee and its quests for documents was a flat out breach of the understanding the committee had with the Agency that it would co-operate with the investigation.
The Committee’s researchers immediately complained to me that Joannides was, in fact, not facilitating, but obstructing our obtaining of documents. I contacted Breckinridge and Joannides. Their side of the story wrote off the complaints to the young age and attitude of the people.
They were certainly right about one question: the Committee’s researchers did not trust the Agency. Indeed, that is precisely why they were in their positions. We wanted to test the Agency’s integrity. I wrote off the complaints. I was wrong; the researchers were right. I now believe the process lacked integrity precisely because of Joannides.
For these reasons, I no longer believe that we were able to conduct an appropriate investigation of the Agency and its relationship to Oswald. Anything that the Agency told us that incriminated, in some fashion, the Agency may well be reliable as far as it goes, but the truth could well be that it materially understates the matter.
What the Agency did not give us, none but those involved in the Agency can know for sure. I do not believe any denial offered by the Agency on any point. The law has long followed the rule that if a person lies to you on one point, you may reject all of his testimony.
I now no longer believe anything the Agency told the Committee any further than I can obtain substantial corroboration for it from outside the Agency for its veracity. We now know that the Agency withheld from the Warren Commission the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. Had the commission known of the plots, it would have followed a different path in its investigation. The Agency unilaterally deprived the commission of a chance to obtain the full truth, which will now never be known.
Significantly, the Warren Commission’s conclusion that the agencies of the government co-operated with it is, in retrospect, not the truth.
We also now know that the Agency set up a process that could only have been designed to frustrate the ability of the committee in 1976-79 to obtain any information that might adversely affect the Agency.
Many have told me that the culture of the Agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation and that you cannot trust it or its people. Period. End of story.
I am now in that camp.
Anyone interested in pursuing this story further should consult the reporting by Jefferson Morley of the Washington Post. See, e.g., Jefferson Morley, “Revelation 1963”, Miami New Times (April 2001).
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| Robert Blakey |
During his appearance for the AARC Conference in 2014, Blakey’s views seem to have crystallized by stating that at first he felt the CIA had cooperated but that he had come to change his mind. He also explained how he was sold the idea by the CIA of bringing in a facilitator in Joannides to help in the liaison between the CIA and the HSCA, and that that was when things went downhill. He also said that they were refused the DRE file and were told by Joannides that there was no case agent for the DRE, when in fact he was the case agent! It was also discovered subsequent to the HSCA hearings that Joannides was acting as an undercover agent in his dealings with the HSCA. He also said that FBI agent Regis Kennedy described Marcello as a tomato salesman who was not part of the mob.
During this presentation and on a 2015 Black Op Radio program he confirmed his belief in the single bullet theory, but also that a shot came from the grassy knoll due to witness testimony from several people who the Warren Commission made every effort to undermine. This includes Secret Service agents, S. M. Holland, and presidential assistant Dave Powers. He said this caused him to lose confidence in the Warren Commission report. He said that “It’s not an investigation … It’s a justification to assert that Oswald acted alone … They used the testimony of Lenny Patrick – a mob shooter – to exculpate Ruby from mob connections …” He concluded that the committees, including the ARRB, were had.
A diligent historian who prides himself in honoring the historical record should really take the time to digest the conclusions of the report and the statements of the high level insiders who are in the know… They do not buy the Warren Commission version of the assassination; they do not conclude that Oswald acted alone; they do not find that the murder was adequately investigated!
Contrary to the other investigations which were governmental, this instance was a civil trial which pitted CIA operative and Watergate burglary planner E. Howard Hunt against Mark Lane. Lane came in because Spotlight was a publication which ran a piece in 1985 reporting that the CIA had a memo confirming its intention to out Hunt as having been involved in the JFK assassination, acting as something like a rogue agent. Hunt sued and won for slander but lost on appeal after Liberty Lobby hired Lane to represent them.
Spotlight wrote the following about its victory: “Scattered news reports did mention Hunt had lost a libel case against The SPOTLIGHT. However, no media reported what the jury forewoman had told the press: ‘Mr. Lane was asking us to do something very difficult. He was asking us to believe John Kennedy had been killed by our own government. Yet when we examined the evidence closely, we were compelled to conclude that the CIA had indeed killed President Kennedy.’”
Mark Lane, who passed away in 2016, was among the earliest researchers who detailed problems about the Warren Commission, which he related in the best-seller Rush to Judgement. His books Plausible Denial and the Last Word cover the trial extensively.
While many Warren Commission defenders have tried to discredit Mark Lane through the years, an open-minded historian should consider the jury members who were asked to play an important role in ensuring that justice was served. They took in and evaluated all the evidence. And have added themselves to the already overwhelming number of insiders who do not buy what is written in most history books, i.e., the Warren Commission version of events.
This Board was created in 1994 after the movie JFK put pressure on Congress to pass the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. During a four-year period, it declassified millions of documents. Its mandate was different from the other investigations: The major purpose of the Review Board was to re-examine for release the records that the agencies still regarded as too sensitive to open to the public. In addition, Congress established the Review Board to help restore government credibility. To achieve these lofty goals, Congress designed an entity that was unprecedented.
It was not set up to re-investigate the case, nor to solve what happened on November 22, 1963. It nevertheless provided valuable information to assassination researchers that historians seem oblivious to. It achieved the following:
Jeremy Gunn – Executive counsel
On November 10, 2013 he made the following remarks for NPR:
“There were many things that were disturbing.”
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| J. Thornton Boswell (left)James J. Humes (center) Pierre Finck (right) |
When Gunn pored over the material, what stuck out most for him was the medical evidence. For instance, what he learned in his 1996 deposition of James Joseph Humes. Humes, who died three years later, was one of the doctors who performed the autopsy on Kennedy’s body.
For one thing, Humes told Gunn that the autopsy was not performed strictly by the book; some procedures were left out, such as removing and weighing all the organs. Then, Humes made an eye-opening revelation.
“Dr. Humes admitted that the supposedly original handwritten version of the autopsy that is in the National Archives is in fact not the original version,” Gunn says. He says Humes had never said that publicly before, even to the Warren Commission.
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| Saundra K. Spencer |
When Gunn showed Saundra Spencer, the Navy Warrant Officer who processed the autopsy film, the official photos from the National Archives during her deposition in 1997, she said they were not the pictures she remembered processing. What’s more, the official pictures weren’t anything like the ones she remembered. “The prints that we printed did not have the massive head damages that is visible here,” she told Gunn. “… The face, the eyes were closed and the face, the mouth was closed, and it was more of a rest position than these show.”
“[I] can recite a litany of other unresolved questions surrounding the Kennedy assassination — ones the Warren Commission failed to answer. For example, in New Orleans in 1963, Oswald came in contact with the FBI. When he was arrested after a scuffle at a demonstration, he asked to meet with the FBI. Why would Oswald ask to see someone from the FBI?” Gunn asks. “But an FBI agent went and interviewed Oswald, came back and wrote a memo on it, put it in the file.”
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| Jeremy Gunn |
“For me, it’s quite simple,” Gunn says. “I don’t know what happened.”
“There is substantial evidence that points toward Oswald and incriminates Oswald,” he says, “and the only person we can name where there is evidence is Oswald. But there’s also rather important exculpatory evidence for Oswald, suggesting he didn’t do it, and that he was framed.”
“So they wanted to write the document in a way that would reassure the American public that it was a single gunman acting alone, somebody who’s a little bit unstable, and that that’s the explanation for what happened. Since the facts aren’t clear, though, that document can look like a whitewash.”
For the Warren Commission, transparency had its own difficulties. “There are serious problems with the forensics evidence, with the ballistics evidence, with the autopsy evidence,” Gunn says. “And, in my opinion, if they had said that openly, it would have not put the issue to rest.”
“If the president had been killed as part of a conspiracy, that needed to be known,” he says.
“The institution that had the opportunity to best get to the bottom of this, as much as it was possible, was the Warren Commission, and they didn’t do it,” he says. “Now it’s too late to do what should have been done originally.”
Doug Horne – Senior analyst
Doug Horne reviewed the military records including the military autopsy for the ARRB. What he found was revealed during interviews as well as the book he wrote, Inside the ARRB, published in 2009. Its contents are fascinating and would surprise students of American history who base their beliefs on many of the history textbooks.
Numerous persons the ARRB deposed or interviewed (FBI agents Sibert and O’Neill, mortician Tom Robinson, and others) have essentially disowned the autopsy photographs showing the back of JFK’s head intact. O’Neill said the photos of the back of the head looked “doctored” (by which he meant that he thought the wound had been repaired – put back together – not that the photo looked altered), and Sibert said the back of the head looked “reconstructed.” Tom Robinson of Gawler’s funeral home said there was a large hole in the back of the head where it looks intact in the photos. Pathologist J. Thornton Boswell said that there was a lot of bone missing in the right rear of the head behind where the scalp looks intact, but did not explain how the scalp could be intact if the bone in the right rear of the skull was missing! (See the ARRB deposition transcripts of Frank O’Neill, James Sibert, and J. Thornton Boswell, as well as the unsworn report of the ARRB interview with Tom Robinson.)
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| Doug Horne |
But perhaps Horne’s most stunning conclusion was that the photographs of “the President’s brain” in the autopsy collection are really photographs of someone else’s brain … a major deception in this case. These images, which appear to show damage consistent with a shot from above and behind, were disowned under oath to the ARRB by John Stringer, the photographer who took the official brain photos at JFK’s supplementary autopsy. He disowned the images because of the angles at which they were shot, and because they were taken on the wrong film – film he did not use. (FBI agent O’Neill also disowned the brain photos in the autopsy collection, saying that there was too much tissue present, and that at autopsy over one half of the President’s brain was missing.) These photos have been used for years by supporters of the Warren Commission’s conclusions to support their shooting scenario, and to discount those who claim there were shots from the front or right front.
Most historians who talked about their sources when writing about the JFK assassination were not aware of the ARRB and the wealth of new evidence made available starting a year after Gerald Posner wrote Case Closed. As a matter of fact, not one cited any of the official investigations as a source other than the Warren Commission. Which, of course, is the oldest, most contested, highly rushed, poorly investigated, biased governmental source possible.
That assessment does not come from independent authors who are trying to sell books. It comes from written reports of subsequent investigations and the statements of a very significant cross-section of insiders that participated in the investigations including the Warren Commission: Senators (some Republicans, some Democrats), counsel, staff members, attorneys, researchers, historians, archivists, investigators, FBI, DPD and Louisiana State law enforcement agents. As well as from the highest ranking members of the HSCA and Church committees. As well as an impressive number of dissenting participants of the Warren Commission itself, who have voiced their opinions in reputable magazines, newspapers, documentaries and books, all easily accessible on the web. We are not talking about zany, fringe, book peddling conspiracy theorists here. These are persons that witnessed the autopsy, questioned persons of interest under oath while looking them in the eye, poured over reports and secret documents, worked in teams to analyze the evidence, etc. – people who the U.S. government entrusted to investigate the crime of the century and who curious historians may learn from.
While they may not all know what in fact happened, they all agree on certain key points: The Warren Commission conclusions are not reliable; the investigations into the assassination were deficient (especially the Warren Commission’s); they are far from certain that Oswald and Ruby acted alone. Many of them believe that: government agencies hid the truth; the Single Bullet Theory is a fabrication; that there has been a long-lasting cover-up; that Oswald and Ruby were involved in very suspicious relationships, and the list goes on and on. All diametrically opposed to what historians, for money, are telling adolescents as part of a captive audience! Which is that Oswald did it and the Warren Commission got it right! End of story!
The American Historical Association statement of conduct stipulates that historians are to honor the historical record.. To do so they first need to know what it is! If the next edition of their history books continues to support the cover-up, their behavior should be considered nothing less than unforgivable.
Go to Addendum
In April 2016 CTKA published this author’s article[i] that revealed how history books portray the JFK assassination as a crime perpetrated by Oswald alone and how authors’ sources are restricted to the Warren Commission and a few books that mostly support the Lone Nut scenario. Information and conclusions coming from other major investigations and pro-conspiracy authors are almost completely ignored.
The article went on to show how the historians violate their own code of conduct on this issue and looked into possible outside influences that may have affected their work and mindsets. The unfortunate result of the lack of diligence on this issue is that captive audiences of young students have been unfairly exposed to a biased, unsound and incomplete account of the Kennedy assassination in most history textbooks.
Another point that came out was that many historians find that independent researchers that write about possible conspiracies lack credibility. There has been much propaganda to discredit them and their work. They are called zany, dishonest, and greedy and their claims are said to be baseless and off the wall. Furthermore they are accused of undermining their own institutions, government and country. Before a serious historian can zero in on whom the reliable researchers are and focus on the soundness of their arguments, they have to cut through clutter caused by hostile, omnipresent anti-conspiracy messaging as well as the cast of shaky researchers peddling low quality work.
This article focuses on what interested historians can easily learn from the official investigations and the opinions and statements from the actual investigators, lawyers, and staff members who were involved in six investigations that were mostly (all but one) government initiated and managed. The Warren Commission was the first one, the one most historians count on almost entirely for their writings, and as we will see, it is the most obsolete and least reliable.
For an historian who finds research on this issue very daunting, this should serve as a starting point – especially for those who, as they did with the Warren Commission Report, have faith in their government institutions and their representatives. What follows is what can be learned from not only the official investigation reports but from the mouths of those who were direct participants in them … the real insiders: Those who were mandated and given special powers to access witnesses and evidence! It therefore discounts the theories and opinions of independent authors.
It may prove difficult to fluff off these sources as being zany, dishonest and greedy … Doing so would suggest a far-fetched governmental conspiracy to deceive its own people and undermine important American institutions.
It is this author’s opinion that historians are disrespecting the American Historical Association statement of conduct about honoring the historical record when they assert that Oswald alone assassinated the president based on the conclusions of the Warren Commission. If they read this article and continue to do so, their actions cannot be blamed on mere ignorance of the facts, or confusion caused by obfuscators. Thereafter, if the historian does not feel compelled to dig deeper to find out what really happened, then the word unforgivable should be added to the word subservient – at least on this issue – when describing their performance. Especially when one considers the age of the subjects who are victimized in what is supposed to be a learning environment.
If they continue to cite the Warren Commission as their key source, they may want to consider taking up smoking cigarettes; after all some of the first studies about this product concluded that it was good for your health.
Established on November 29, 1963, it was set up by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the November 22, 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. The Commission presented an 888-page report[ii] and twenty-six volumes of evidence on September 24, 1964. Its major conclusions were that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing JFK and that nightclub owner Jack Ruby also acted alone in killing Oswald two days later.
The Commission had “not found evidence” linking either Oswald or Ruby to a conspiracy. (WR, p. 21)
The first hint of dissension among the members of the commission is the following bewildering statement in the report which points to a rift concerning the Single Bullet theory and Connally’s testimony: “Although it is not necessary to any essential findings of the Commission to determine just which shot hit Governor Connally, there is very persuasive evidence from the experts to indicate that the same bullet which pierced the President’s throat also caused Governor Connally’s wounds. However, Governor Connally’s testimony and certain other factors have given rise to some difference of opinion as to this probability but there is no question in the mind of any member of the Commission that all the shots which caused the President’s and the Governor’s wounds were fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.” (WR, Page 19)
What is not being said directly here is that certain members of the Commission, as well as John Connally and his wife, did not believe that a single bullet caused all seven wounds, which is in fact necessary to the essential conclusions. Because if one bullet caused Kennedy’s head wound and another caused bystander James Tague’s injury, then for Oswald to be the lone shooter, he would have had to have caused all remaining seven wounds with his only other shot, because even the Warren Commission acknowledges that Oswald could not have fired more than three shots.
While most historians continue to place their faith in the Warren Commission, it is most noteworthy that an important number of important participants in the investigation had serious doubts about crucial elements in the report.
Roger Craig – Dallas Deputy Sheriff
Roger Craig was very well regarded up until the assassination. He was on duty and in Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination. In a number of interviews he explains what he witnessed on November 22, 1963: He was in the Book Depository when the alleged murder weapon was found which he confirmed as a Mauser and not the Mannlicher-Carcano that the Warren Commission claimed Oswald owned. (Contrary to what some have written, the brand name Mauser and the calibre are stamped on some editions of the Mauser rifle; see here The Mauser, the Carcano and the Lt. Day Rifle ) Furthermore Craig claimed to have seen Oswald entering a station wagon a few minutes after the assassination, which would contradict the Warren Commission’s chronology of Oswald’s movements and implicated a getaway driver – the following is part of his Warren Commission testimony:
Roger Craig: I drove up to Fritz’ office about, oh, after 5 … about 5:30 or something like that and talked to Captain Fritz and told him what I had saw. And he took me in his office … I believe it was his office … . it was a little office, and had the suspect sitting in a chair behind a desk … beside the desk. And another gentleman, I didn’t know him, he was sitting in another chair to my left as I walked in the office. And Captain Fritz asked me “was this the man I saw” and I said, “Yes,” it was.
David Belin: All right. Will you describe the man you saw in Captain Fritz’ office?
Roger Craig: Oh, he was sitting down but he had the same medium brown hair; it was still … well, it was kinda wild looking; he was slender, and what I could tell of him sitting there, he was … short. By that, I mean not myself, I’m five eleven … he was shorter than I was. And fairly light build.
David Belin: Could you see his trousers?
Roger Craig: No; I couldn’t see his trousers at all.
David Belin: What about his shirt?
Roger Craig: I believe, as close as I can remember, a T-shirt … a white T-shirt.
David Belin: All right. But you didn’t see him in a lineup? You just saw him sitting there?
Roger Craig: No; he was sitting there by himself in a chair … off to one side.
David Belin: All right. Then, what did Captain Fritz say and what did you say and what did the suspect say?
Roger Craig: Captain Fritz then asked … . “What about this station wagon?” And the suspect interrupted him and said, “That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine” … I believe is what he said. “Don’t try to tie her into this. She had nothing to do with it.”
In Craig’s 1971 book When They Kill a President, he describes that many in the DPD despised Kennedy, and how the DPD was excluded from security duties the day of the assassination. The following is David Ratcliffe’s summary of the Book:
… He was a member of a group of men from Dallas County Sheriff James Eric “Bill” Decker‘s office that was directed to stand out in front of the Sheriff‘s office on Main Street (at the corner of Houston) and “take no part whatsoever in the security of that motorcade.” Once he heard the first shot, Roger Craig immediately bolted towards Houston Street. His participation in the formative hours of the investigation during the rest of that day and into the evening included observations and experiences that would have singlehandedly destroyed the entire Warren Commission fairy tale before a grand jury or a Congressional investigation.
Roger Craig was named the Dallas Sheriff‘s Department “Officer of the Year” in 1960 by the Dallas Traffic Commission. He received four promotions while he was Deputy Sheriff. Among the most important events he witnessed: At approximately 12:40 p.m., Craig was standing on the south side of Elm Street when he heard a shrill whistle coming from the north side of Elm and turned to see a man—wearing faded blue trousers and a long sleeved work shirt made of some type of grainy material—come running down the grassy knoll from the direction of the TSBD. He saw a light green Rambler station wagon coming slowly west on Elm Street, pull over to the north curb and pick up the man coming down the hill. By this time the traffic was too heavy for him to be able to reach them before the car drove away going west on Elm.
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| Roger Craig |
After witnessing the above scene, Deputy Craig ran to the command post at Elm and Houston to report the incident to the authorities. When he got there and asked who was involved in the investigation, a man turned to him and said “I‘m with the Secret Service.” Craig recounted what he had just seen. This “Secret Service” man showed little interest in Craig‘s description of the people leaving, but seemed extremely interested in the description of the Rambler to the degree this was the only part of the recounting that he wrote down. Immediately after this Craig was told by Sheriff Decker to help the police search the TSBD. Deputy Craig was one of the people to find the three rifle cartridges on the floor beneath the window on the southeast corner of the sixth floor. Originally, all three were no more than an inch or two apart. One of the three shells was crimped on the end which would have held the slug. It had not been stepped on but merely crimped over on one small portion of the rim. The rest of that end was perfectly round.
He was among those present after the rifle was found. And, along with Deputy Eugene Boone who had first spotted the weapon, was immediately joined by police Lt. Day, Homicide Capt. Fritz, and deputy constable Seymour Weitzman, an expert on weapons who had been in the sporting goods business for many years and was familiar with all domestic and foreign makes. Lt. Day briefly inspected the rifle and handed it to Capt. Fritz who asked if anyone knew what kind of rifle it was. After a close examination, Weitzman declared it to be a 7.65 German Mauser. Capt. Fritz agreed with him. At the moment when Capt. Fritz concurred with Weitzman‘s identification of the rifle, an unknown Dallas police officer came running up the stairs and advised Capt. Fritz that a Dallas policeman had been shot in the Oak Cliff area. Craig instinctively looked at his watch. The time was 1:06 p.m. (The Warren Commission attempted to move this time back beyond 1:15 to create a plausible claim Oswald had reached the Tippit murder scene in a more humanly possible time-frame than would be the case if Tippit had the encounter with his murderer earlier.)
Later in the afternoon Craig received word of Oswald‘s arrest and that he was suspected of being involved in Kennedy‘s murder. He immediately thought of the man running down the grassy knoll and made a telephone call to Capt. Will Fritz to give him the description of the man he had seen. Fritz said Craig‘s description sounded like the man they had and asked him to come take a look. When he saw Oswald in Fritz‘s personal office Deputy Craig confirmed that this was indeed the man, dressed in the same way, that he had seen running down the knoll and into the Rambler. They went into the office together and Fritz told Oswald, “This man (pointing to me) saw you leave.” At which time the suspect replied, “I told you people I did.” Fritz, apparently trying to console Oswald, said, “Take it easy, son—we‘re just trying to find out what happened.” Fritz then said, “What about the car?” Oswald replied, leaning forward on Fritz‘s desk, “That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine—don‘t try to drag her into this.” Sitting back in his chair, Oswald said very disgustedly and very low, “Everybody will know who I am now.”
The fact that Fritz said ‘car’ and this elicited Oswald‘s outburst about a station wagon—that no one else had mentioned—confirms the veracity of Roger Craig‘s story.
Junior counsel for the Warren Commission Dave Belin, was the man who interviewed Roger Craig in April of 1964. After being questioned in what Craig recounts as a very manipulative and selective way, Belin asked “Do you want to follow or waive your signature or sign now?” Craig noted, “Since there was nothing but a tape recording and a stenographer‘s note book, there was obviously nothing to sign. All other testimony which I have read (a considerable amount) included an explanation that the person could waive his signature then or his statement would be typed and he would be notified when it was ready for signature. Belin did not say this to me.” After Craig first saw the transcript in January of 1968 he discovered that the testimony he gave had been changed in fourteen different places.
Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig never changed his account of what he witnessed and experienced on Friday, November 22, 1963. The passage where he describes the methodology employed by David Belin in selectively recording his testimony is highly illuminating and provides us with a glimpse of how the Commission interviewed witnesses in a very controlled way. (And is echoed by the experience of Victoria Adams, another key witness, as described in Barry Ernst’s book, The Girl on the Stairs.) Craig remained convinced, for the rest of this life, that the man entering the Rambler station wagon was Lee Harvey Oswald. He was fired from the Sheriff‘s office on July 4, 1967, and from that day forward he never again could find steady work. Multiple attempts were made on his life, his wife finally left him, and in the end, he allegedly shot himself on May 15, 1975.
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| Jesse Curry (Chief of Dallas Police) |
Jesse Curry – Dallas Chief of Police
Curry who was in the motorcade just in front of the president and interviewed Oswald after the assassination is on the record for saying: “There is a possibility that one (a shot) came from in front of us … By the direction of the blood and the brains of the president from one of the shots, it just seems it would have to be fired from the front … I can’t say that I could swear that there was one man and one man alone, I think that there is the possibility that there could be another man … “. He also stated they were never able to place Oswald on the sixth floor with the rifle in his hands.
James Sibert and Francis O’Neill – FBI agents
Sibert and O’Neill witnessed the autopsy in Bethesda and wrote a report about it which disproves the Single Bullet theory and explains why junior counsel Arlen Specter, who interviewed them, prevented them from talking to the Warren Commission and also kept their report hidden.
The eventually declassified report, Sibert’s deposition to the ARRB and his interview with William Matson Law for his 2005 book In the Eye of History: Disclosures in the JFK Assassination Medical Evidence do not help Specter’s case whatsoever:
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| James Sibert (FBI) |
Law: Here’s a piece I don’t know what to think of. He said – Custer again – he’s talking about finding a bullet fragment in the autopsy room. I’ve talked to quite a few people and no one else remembers this: “I called one of the pathologists over and said, ‘Hey, we have a bullet here.’ As soon as they heard that, they came down off the raised platform, they ran over and then picked it up. Then Sibert and O’Neill also came over and said, `Well, we want that.’
Sibert: We never … the only thing we took position of, William, was a little jar with bullet fragments that had been removed from the brain. You know, metal particles?
Law: That’s the only thing I’ve ever had reported to me, and Mr. Custer has since passed away.
Sibert: I don’t remember anything about a bullet – you know they couldn’t find that bullet wound in the back – and they probed that and there was no exit. So, I said, “Well, let me go and call over at the lab, see if there is any kind of an ice bullet that might have fragmentized completely.” That was when I called agent Killion over at the lab, and he said, “Have you learned about the bullet they found under the stretcher over at Parkland?” Now, I came back and reported that to Humes, the chief pathologist, and that’s the only – I never saw that bullet. They were sending that bullet in, but it didn’t come into the autopsy room. I think they flew it into the Washington area, and that went directly to the FBI laboratory, the firearms section.
Law: I’ve talked to Mr. O’Neill quite a bit about this and asked him about his belief in the single-bullet theory, and he said, “Absolutely not, it did not happen!”
Sibert: Well, you can put me in the same category! Have you read Arlen Specter’s latest book, Passion For Truth?”
Law: No, I haven’t. I do not believe in the single-bullet theory from all I’ve read, and how can …
Sibert: I told them before they asked me to come up for the [ARRB] deposition, I said: “Well, before I come up, I want to tell you one thing: I don’t buy the single bullet theory.” And they said, “We don’t expect you to.”
Law: Yes, when I talked to Mr. O’Neill, he was adamant that it did not happen.
Sibert: In the first place, they moved the bullet wound, the one in the back. See, I don’t know if you recall, but over at Parkland, they weren’t even aware of the back wound, because they had a big fight over there as to who had jurisdiction. Texas had a law that any kind of a murder done in Texas, the autopsy had to be performed there. They didn’t know about the back wound. But they get to Bethesda – here’s the pathetic part – they found the wound in the back, of course, they took the wound in the neck as a straight tracheotomy and they didn’t find out that it was a bullet wound until the next morning when they called Parkland.
Law: Do you think it was a straight tracheotomy?
Sibert: Oh! They said over there that the … I forget who the doctor was there but he said he made that tracheotomy right over a bullet wound.
Law: That was Malcolm Perry.
Sibert: Perry, yeah. And you know, a lot of them over there said first that they thought it was an entrance wound. So, you had Parkland not knowing about the back wound, you had Bethesda not knowing about the bullet wound in the neck, taking it as a tracheotomy; which really gets you off on the right foot.
Law: Were you surprised you weren’t called before the Warren Commission?
Sibert: I was at the time, but now I can understand why.
Law: Why do you think you weren’t called?
Sibert: Why? In other words, with that single-bullet theory, if they went in there and asked us to pinpoint where the bullet entered the back and the measurements and all that stuff, how are you going to work it? See, the way they got the single-bullet theory, was by moving that back wound up to the base of the neck.
… Law: I was going to ask you to tell me your thoughts on Mr. Specter and the single-bullet theory.
Sibert: Well I – that single-bullet theory – when they had me come up to the ARRB deposition there at College Park, I said, “Well before I come up there, I want you to know one thing. I’m not an advocate of the single-bullet theory.” I said, “I don’t believe it because I stood there two foot from where that bullet wound was in the back, the one that they eventually moved up to the base of the neck. I was there when Boswell made his face sheet and located that wound exactly as we described it in the FD 302.” And I said, “Furthermore, when they examined the clothing after it got into the Bureau, those bullet holes in the shirt and the coat were down 5 inches there. So there is no way that bullet could have gone that low then rise up and come out the front of the neck, zigzag and hit Connally and then end up pristine on a stretcher over there in Dallas.”
Law: You don’t believe in the single-bullet theory. Period.
Sibert: There is no way I will swallow that. They can’t put enough sugar on it for me to bite it. That bullet was too low in the back.
Law: Where do you remember seeing it, exactly? Your partner, Frank O’Neill, if I remember right, credits you with finding the bullet hole in the back.
Sibert: Well, let me clarify that. When they had the body over at Parkland, they had a shoving match between the fellow who was going to do the autopsy who said that the autopsy had to be done in Texas – and they were going to do it there – and you had Kellerman telling them that he had orders from the Secret Service and also from Bobby Kennedy that it was going to be done in Washington. At Parkland, they never knew there was a bullet wound in the back. That body left there and they did not know about the bullet wound in the back. Then, Bethesda did not know there was a bullet wound where the tracheotomy was made. So that is a pathetic situation. It could have been handled if they had made a phone call. The smart thing to have done – if there hadn’t been such animosity between the partners over there – put one of those Parkland doctors on Air Force One to come right into Bethesda and say, “Here’s what we did.” And the clothing should have come in with the body. But they held the clothing – they didn’t even undo the tie over there at Parkland and there was a nick in the knot – and here you had this entrance or exit wound in the throat where the tracheotomy was.
Law also interviewed O’Neill:
Law: Were you surprised you were not called before the Warren Commission?
O’Neill: Yes. Because we had pertinent information and the information that was given to the Warren Commission as a result of our interview with Mr. Specter was not a hundred percent accurate ….
Law: I have your testimony to the ARRB. They asked you about the bullet wound in the throat and you said, “Well, I question it. I’ll tell you more later.” Why did you question the bullet wound to the throat?
O’Neill: Because there was no such thing as a bullet wound in the throat at that particular time. We only learned about the bullet wound in the throat in particular – well, let me see – we learned about that after the doctors – not “we” – but it was learned by the doctors who performed the autopsy after they had called down to Dallas to speak to the hospital. Ah, I think it was Malcolm Perry?
Law: Malcolm Perry was the attending physician.
O’Neill: That’s the only time that they became aware that there was a bullet wound in the throat.
Law: Do you believe there was a bullet wound in the throat?
O’Neill: I have no idea. It was not a question – I mean it was a question – there was not a question in my mind about a bullet wound in the throat, it just never came up. It was a tracheotomy, period, until we found out that it was performed over the bullet wound – over a wound – because they weren’t sure it was a bullet wound at that time.
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As Law concluded, “O’Neill and Sibert are adamant that the single-bullet theory is wrong. ‘That’s Arlen Specter’s theory,’ O’Neill told me. It’s quite evident from my conversations with them that they have no respect for the one-time assistant counsel to the Warren Commission, now Senator from Pennsylvania. When I questioned Jim Sibert about the single-bullet theory and Arlen Specter, he went as far as to say, ‘What a liar. I feel he got his orders from above – how far above I don’t know.’”
The single-bullet theory is key to the “lone-nut” scenario. If, in fact, a bullet did not hit Kennedy in the back, come out his throat, hit Governor Connally in the back, exit his right chest, slam into his right wrist, breaking the bone and cutting the radial nerve, and then pierce his left thigh and fall out in remarkably pristine condition onto a stretcher at Parkland Hospital, then there was more than one assassin and, hence, conspiracy. The single-bullet theory is the linchpin of the government case against Lee Harvey Oswald. If the theory is false, the lone-assassin concept crumbles to dust.
Alex Rosen – Former FBI Assistant Director
Alex Rosen told the Committee (Church Committee testimony) that the FBI was not actively investigating a conspiracy, but was “in the position of standing on the corner with our pockets open, waiting for someone to drop information into it … “ (Source: Mary Ferrell Foundation)
Charles Shaffer – Staff member – Former Justice Department Investigator
In a 2014 Washington Post interview Charles Shaffer admitted that he now thinks that JFK was assassinated as a result of a mob-related conspiracy involving Santos Trafficante and Carlos Marcello. He also claimed that Warren’s biggest blunder was not allowing Ruby to testify in Washington where he may have exposed a conspiracy.
Alfredda Scobey – Staff member – Law assistant to court of appeal State of Georgia
Scobey wrote down notes taking the position of what a defense lawyer for Oswald could have argued with respect to the evidence presented by the Warren Commission. Her observations underscore many problems the prosecution would have faced including: The denial of Oswald’s right to legal counsel; the inadmissibility of his wife’s testimony; the poor quality of Helen Markham as witness to the Tippit assassination; the number of witnesses that refused to identify Oswald as Tippit’s assassin; the lack of pertinence of the Walker incident; the evidence obtained from the Paines’ without a warrant; the chain of possession of the rifle, etc.
Burt Griffin and Leon Hubert – Assistant counsels
Burt Griffin and Leon Hubert were charged with investigating Jack Ruby and while they had not concluded that Ruby was involved in a conspiracy, they were clearly not satisfied with the investigation and information transferred to them by the FBI or CIA. This is made clear by memos written by them and answers Judge Griffin gave in his HSCA testimony.
Lisa Pease, in an August 1995 Probe article, gives a good summary of the memos:
… Assistant counsels to the Warren Commission Burt Griffin and Leon Hubert wrote, in a memo to the Warren Commission members dated March 20, 1964, that “the most promising links between Jack Ruby and the assassination of President Kennedy are established through underworld figures and anti-Castro Cubans, and extreme right-wing Americans.” Two months later, Griffin and Hubert wrote another memo to the Commission, significantly titled “Adequacy of the Ruby Investigation” in which they warned, “We believe that a reasonable possibility exists that Ruby has maintained a close interest in Cuban affairs to the extent necessary to participate in gun sales or smuggling.”
Ruby had talked about it himself while in jail, reportedly telling a friend, “They’re going to find out about Cuba. They’re going to find out about the guns, find out about New Orleans, find out about everything.” Tales of Ruby running guns to Cuba abounded in the FBI reports taken in the first weeks after the assassination, yet neither the Warren Commission nor the House Select Committee pursued those leads very far. Griffin and Hubert expressed concern over this, saying that “neither Oswald’s Cuban interests in Dallas nor Ruby’s Cuban activities have been adequately explored.”
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| Burt Griffin |
Hubert and Griffin expressed in their memo of May 14 to Rankin that “we believe that the possibility exists, based on evidence already available, that Ruby was involved in illegal dealings with Cuban elements who might have had contact with Oswald. The existence of such dealings can only be surmised since the present investigation has not focused on that area.” They expressed concern that “Ruby had time to engage in substantial activities in addition to the management of his Clubs” and that “Ruby has always been a person who looked for money-making ‘sidelines’.” They even suggested that since the Fort Worth manufacturer of the famous “Twist Board” Ruby was demonstrating the night after the assassination had no known sales, and was manufactured by an oil field equipment company, that “[t]he possibility remains that the ‘twist board’ was a front for some other illegal enterprise.” But what Griffin and Hubert kept coming back to is that there was “much evidence” that Ruby “was interested in Cuban matters”, citing his relationship to Louis McWillie; his attempted sale of jeeps to Castro, his reported attendance of meetings “in connection with the sale of arms to Cubans and the smuggling out of refugees“; and Ruby’s quick correction of Wade’s remark that Oswald was a member of the Free Cuba Committee, a group populated with such notables as Clare Booth Luce, Admiral Arleigh Burke, and CIA journalistic asset Hal Hendrix: “Bits of evidence link Ruby to others who may have been interested in Cuban affairs.”
During his HSCA testimony, Griffin made it clear that the requests to investigate Ruby further were not followed up on.
In the documentary The Killing of President Kennedy, Griffin is even blunter: “I feel betrayed … the CIA lied to us …” He goes on to state CIA concealed their efforts to kill Castro and their links with the mafia, which would have been very important for the investigation. Griffin is also on the record as saying: “In any area where Oswald’s relation to the FBI … We could not trust Hoover”. This is important because the Warren Commission had very little investigative resources and relied heavily on the FBI for information gathering.
Senator Richard Russell – Warren Commissioner
Senator Russell in a stunning phone conversation with LBJ on September 18, 1964 voiced his disagreement with the Single Bullet theory very directly:
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| Sen. Richard Russell |
“They were trying to prove that the same bullet that hit Kennedy first was the one that hit Connally, went through him and through his hand, his bone, into his leg and everything else. … The commission believes that the same bullet that hit Kennedy hit Connally. Well, I don’t believe it.” … “And so I couldn’t sign it. And I said that Governor Connally testified directly to the contrary, and I’m not going to approve of that. So I finally made them say there was a difference in the commission, in that part of them believed that that wasn’t so. And of course if a fellow was accurate enough to hit Kennedy right in the neck on one shot and knock his head off in the next one … and he’s leaning up against his wife’s head … and not even wound her … why, he didn’t miss completely with that third shot. But according to their theory, he not only missed the whole automobile, but he missed the street! Well, a man that’s a good enough shot to put two bullets right into Kennedy, he didn’t miss that whole automobile.”
Just before his death Russell said publically that he believed that someone else worked with Oswald.
Senator John Cooper – Commissioner
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| Sen. John Sherman Cooper |
Senator John Cooper is also on the record for having written about the Single Bullet theory: “it seems to me that Governor Connally’s statement negates such a conclusion.” He later confirmed his stance in an interview for the BBC documentary The Killing of President Kennedy.
Congressman Hale Boggs – Commissioner
Boggs was neither convinced that Oswald was the assassin, nor that Ruby acted alone. According to legal advisor Bernard Fensterwald:
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| Rep. Hale Boggs |
“Almost from the beginning, Congressman Boggs had been suspicious over the FBI and CIA’s reluctance to provide hard information when the Commission’s probe turned to certain areas, such as allegations that Oswald may have been an undercover operative of some sort. When the Commission sought to disprove the growing suspicion that Oswald had once worked for the FBI, Boggs was outraged that the only proof of denial that the FBI offered was a brief statement of disclaimer by J. Edgar Hoover. It was Hale Boggs who drew an admission from Allen Dulles that the CIA’s record of employing someone like Oswald might be so heavily coded that the verification of his service would be almost impossible for outside investigators to establish.”
According to one of his friends: “Hale felt very, very torn during his work (on the Commission) … he wished he had never been on it and wished he’d never signed it (the Warren Report).” Another former aide argued that, “Hale always returned to one thing: Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission – on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it.”
Congressman Gerald Ford – Warren Commissioner
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| Pres. Valéry Giscard-d’Estaing |
In public Gerald Ford was a staunch defender of the Warren Commission’s findings and conclusions, describing the report as a Gibraltar of factual literature. However, in private he seems to have held a very different discourse.
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| Gerald Ford |
Valérie Giscard D’Estaing, ex-president of France, claimed the following in an interview he gave to RTL:
Gerald Ford (president of the United States from 1974 to 1977, editor’s note) was a member of the Warren Commission», he resumes. «Once I was making a car trip with him, he was then President as I was myself. I said to him: ‘Let me ask you an indiscreet question: you were on the Warren Commission, what conclusions did you arrive at?’ He told me: ‘It’s not a satisfactory one. We arrived at an initial conclusion: it was not the work of one person, it was something set up. We were sure that it was set up. But we were not able to discover by whom.’»
In 1997 the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) released a document that revealed that Ford had altered the first draft of the Warren Report to read: “A bullet had entered the base of the back of his neck slightly to the right of the spine.”
LBJ – President
In a 1969 interview with Walter Cronkite, Lyndon Johnson said that he had not completely discounted the possibility of international connections to the murder.
As we can see, the conclusions of the Warren Commission are far from convincing, for they are belied by many of those who played important and direct roles in the investigation. Far from the Gibraltar that Gerald Ford referred to, it was on weak footing from the outset and things only went downhill from there.
It is clearly unsound for historians to refer to the Warren Commission as their key and only source when describing Ruby and Oswald as lone perpetrators of the crimes related to the November 22, 1963 tragedy. Considering the other government investigations that followed which impeach its modus operandi and many of its conclusions, it is like ignoring a judgement reversal after an appeal and only citing the discredited judgement of the original trial.
Starting in 1966, New Orleans DA Jim Garrison investigated the assassination. This led to the 1969 trial of Clay Shaw, a well-known local businessman, who was accused of being part of a conspiracy. While the jury found Shaw not guilty, according to Mark Lane – who had advised Garrison – most jurors felt there had nevertheless been a conspiracy.
This investigation shed light on many, up to then under-reported, issues. Let us consider some of them:
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| Pierre Finck |
Francis Fruge – Garrison case investigator – Louisana State Police Lieutenant
Francis Fuge’s entry into the case actually began a few days before the assassination when he first encountered and questioned Rose Cheramie, a heroin addicted call girl and drug courier, who predicted the assassination, and talked about her links with Jack Ruby while she was hospitalized from November 20-22, 1963. He met her again right after the murder. Fruge later became an important investigator for Jim Garrison. His account of this extremely incriminating story was summarized in a thoroughly documented July 1999 Probe Magazine article:
As Fruge so memorably recalled to Jonathan Blackmer of the HSCA, Cheramie summed up her itinerary in Dallas in the following manner: “She said she was going to, number one, pick up some money, pick up her baby, and to kill Kennedy.” (p. 9 of Fruge’s 4/18/78 deposition)
At the hospital, Cheramie again predicted the assassination. Again, before it happened on November 22nd, to more than one nurse. The nurses, in turn, told others of Cheramie’s prognostication. (Memo of Frank Meloche to Louis Ivon, 5/22/67). Further, according to a psychiatrist there, Dr. Victor Weiss, Rose “…told him that she knew both Ruby and Oswald and had seen them sitting together on occasions at Ruby’s club.” (Ibid., 3/13/67) In fact, Fruge later confirmed the fact that she had worked as a stripper for Ruby. (Louisiana State Police report of 4/4/67.)
Fruge had discounted Cheramie’s earlier comments to him as drug-induced delusions. Or, as he said to Blackmer, “When she came out with the Kennedy business, I just said, wait a minute, wait a minute, something wrong here somewhere.” (Fruge, HSCA deposition, p. 9)
He further described her in this manner:
“Now, bear in mind that she talked: she’d talk for a while, looks like the shots would have effect on her again and she’d go in, you know, she’d just get numb, and after awhile she’d just start talking again.” (Ibid.)
But apparently, at the time of the assassination Cheramie appeared fine. The word spread throughout the hospital that she had predicted Kennedy’s murder in advance. Dr. Wayne Owen, who had been interning from LSU at the time, later told the Madison Capital Times that he and other interns were told of the plot in advance of the assassination. Amazingly, Cheramie even predicted the role of her former boss Jack Ruby because Owen was quoted as saying that one of the interns was told “…that one of the men involved in the plot was a man named Jack Rubinstein.” (2/11/68) Owen said that they shrugged it off at the time. But when they learned that Rubinstein was Ruby they grew quite concerned. “We were all assured that something would be done about it by the FBI or someone. Yet we never heard anything.” (Ibid.) In fact, Cheramie’s association with Ruby was also revealed to Dr. Weiss. For in an interview with him after the assassination, Rose revealed that she had worked as a drug courier for Jack Ruby. (Memo of Frank Meloche to Jim Garrison, 2/23/67) In the same memo, there is further elaboration on this important point:
“I believe she also mentioned that she worked in the night club for Ruby and that she was forced to go to Florida with another man whom she did not name to pick up a shipment of dope to take back to Dallas, that she didn’t want to do this thing but she had a young child and that they would hurt her child if she didn’t.”
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| Francis Fruge |
These comments are, of course, very revealing about Ruby’s role in both an intricate drug smuggling scheme and, at the least, his probable acquaintance with men who either had knowledge of, or were actually involved in, the assassination. This is a major point in this story which we will return to later.
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| Rose Cheramie |
Although Fruge had discounted the Cheramie story on November 20th, the events of the 22nd made him a believer. Right after JFK’s murder, Fruge “…called that hospital up in Jackson and told them by no way in the world to turn her loose until I could get my hands on her.” (Fruge’s HSCA deposition, p. 12.) So on November 25th, Fruge journeyed up to Jackson State Hospital again to talk to Cheramie. This time he conducted a much more in-depth interview. Fruge found out that Cheramie had been traveling with the two men from Miami. He also found that the men seemed to be a part of the conspiracy rather than to be just aware of it. After the assassination, they were supposed to stop by a home in Dallas to pick up around eight thousand dollars plus Rose’s baby. From there Cheramie was supposed to check into the Rice Hotel in Houston under an assumed name. Houston is in close proximity to Galveston, the town from which the drugs were coming in. From Houston, once the transaction was completed, the trio were headed for Mexico.
How reliable a witness was Cheramie? Extermely. Fruge decided to have the drug deal aspect of her story checked out by the state troopers and U. S. Customs. The officers confirmed the name of the seaman on board the correct ship coming into Galveston. The Customs people checked the Rice Hotel and the reservations had been made for her under an assumed name. The contact who had the money and her baby was checked and his name showed that he was an underworld, suspected narcotics dealer. Fruge checked Cheramie’s baggage and found that one box had baby clothes and shoes inside.
Fruge flew Cheramie from Louisiana to Houston on Tuesday, the 26th. In the back seat of the small Sesna 180, a newspaper was lying between them. One of the headlines read to the effect that “investigators or something had not been able to establish a relationship between Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald.” (Fruge’s HSCA deposition p. 19) When Cheramie read this headline, she started to giggle. She then added, “Them two queer sons-of-a-bitches. They’ve been shacking up for years.” (Ibid.) She added that she knew this to be true from her experience of working for Ruby. Fruge then had his superior call up Captain Will Fritz of the Dallas Police to relay what an important witness Cheramie could be in his investigation. Fruge related what followed afterwards:
Colonel Morgan called Captain Fritz up from Dallas and told him what we had, the information that we had, that we had a person that had given us this information. And of course there again it was an old friend, and there was a little conversation. But anyway, when Colonel Morgan hung up, he turned around and told us they don’t want her. They’re not interested.
Fruge then asked Cheramie if she wished to try telling her tale to the FBI. She declined. She did not wish to involve herself further.
Perhaps no other person who believed there was a conspiracy was vilified more than Jim Garrison. He has been called a charlatan, a publicity-seeker and crazy, among other things. With time however, many of his claims have been vindicated. While some described his case as a farce, it is often overlooked that Garrison had presented his evidence beforehand to a three-judge panel who concluded that he was justified to bring it to court, and that the subsequent HSCA investigation concluded that Garrison and his office “had established an association of an undetermined nature between Ferrie, a suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy, and Clay Shaw and Lee Harvey Oswald” – a devastating blow to Garrison detractors.
Other information from later investigations reveals that his efforts were sabotaged by adversaries who infiltrated his volunteer team and weakened his efforts; well-orchestrated propaganda attacking both his case and reputation; refusals to his subpoenas for out-of-state witnesses and the harassment, turning and untimely deaths of some of his key witnesses, including the suspicious deaths of star-witness David Ferrie and the murder of Eladio Del Valle. Other evidence that began to emerge showed that Clay Shaw, despite his denials, was in fact a CIA asset and part of a CIA organization of interest called Permindex.
To form their own opinion about Garrison, historians who are not of a pre-judging nature or overly stubborn are advised to read his highly revealing Playboy interview and his book: On the Trail of the Assassins.
After a 1974 New York Times report on illegal acts committed by the CIA, Gerald Ford set up the Rockefeller Commission headed by his Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller in 1975. It publicized the CIA MK/Ultra mind control experiments and revealed its illegal mail opening and US protester surveillance programs (MH/Chaos). It also held a very narrow investigation into the Kennedy assassination focusing on the Zapruder film, some of the medical evidence and whether Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt, who had just gained notoriety because of their roles in the Watergate scandal, were involved in the assassination. In a short eighteen-page chapter about the assassination it concluded that the CIA had not been involved and that only three shots were fired from behind the motorcade.
Many distrusted this Commission because of the involvement of key Warren Commission members such as Ford and David Belin. It was largely superseded by the Church and HSCA committees that succeeded it and that were much farther reaching.
It was during this period that, as Daniel Schorr later wrote, Ford let slip the bombshell that the CIA had been involved in assassinations. Which, as we saw previously, he probably learned about on the Warren Commission. But CIA Director Bill Colby then spun this to mean the assassination of foreign leaders.
This U.S. Senate Committee was chaired by Senator Frank Church and issued 14 reports in 1975 and 1976 after interviewing hundreds of witnesses and studying thousands of files from the FBI, CIA and other agencies.
It delved into U.S. assassination plots against foreign leaders, which were a key component of CIA regime control or change operations. Their targets included Congo’s Lumumba, Castro of Cuba, the Diem brothers of Vietnam, Gen. Schneider of Chile, President Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. Ex CIA leader Allen Dulles’ pact with the mafia to assassinate Castro was also part of their findings. This information, which could have impacted the Warren Commission investigation, was kept secret by Dulles while he was one of its commissioners.
Volume 4 of the report sheds light on HT/LINGUAL, the illegal mail intercept programs involving both the CIA and the FBI.
The Committee also reported on the extent the CIA partnered with media and academia, in an effort to control the media, later called Operation Mockingbird: “The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.”
Lead by Senators Gary Hart and Richard Schweiker, the Church Committee also conducted a focused investigation (Book 5) of the Kennedy assassination, concentrating on how the FBI and CIA supported the Warren Commission. Its report was very critical of these agencies: ” … developed evidence which impeaches the process by which the intelligence agencies arrived at their own conclusions about the assassination, and by which they provided information to the Warren Commission. This evidence indicates that the investigation of the assassination was deficient.”
If this conclusion does not shake historians blind faith in the Blue Ribbon Warren Commission, perhaps comments from the sub-committee leaders might help create some doubt.
Senator Gary Hart
An interview Hart gave to the Denver Post after his stint on the committee clearly showed that he did not buy the Warren Commission depiction of Oswald, nor did he find that the FBI and the CIA were transparent with what they knew:
“Who Oswald really was – who did he know? What affiliation did he have in the Cuban network? Was his public identification with the left-wing a cover for a connection with the anti-Castro right-wing?”
Hart believed that Oswald was a double agent which was one of the reasons why the FBI and CIA had made “a conscious decision to withhold evidence from the Warren Commission.”
During the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination Hart was interviewed by the Huffington Post and one can only deduce that his views about the inadequacy of the Warren Commission investigation and mainstream media’s efforts into getting to the bottom of things had hardened based on the following statements:
“It’s amazing to me that American journalism never followed up on that story very much, because if you found out who killed those two guys, you might have some really interesting information on your hands.”
“I went down to Miami when [Johnny] Roselli was killed and talked to this Dade County sheriff from the Miami Police Department, and they showed me pictures of him being fished out of the water in the barrel and how he’d been killed — nightmarish stuff. And [Momo Salvatore] Giancana was killed in his own basement with six bullet holes in his throat with a Chicago police car and an FBI car outside his house.”
“I was always amazed in that particular instance of the CIA-Mafia connection and the Cuban connection 12 years — coming up 12 years — after Kennedy was killed that somebody didn’t go after that story … New York Times, Washington Post, anybody. And they didn’t. They reported the deaths and that was it, and the strange quirky coincidence, you know, but nothing more.”
“You don’t have to be a genius to believe that they knew something about the coincidence of events — Cuba, Mafia, CIA and Kennedy — that somebody didn’t want that out in the public 12 years later.”
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| Sen. Gary Hart |
The article also underscores the following intriguing insight: According to Hart, the Warren Commission — the presidential commission charged with investigating Kennedy’s assassination that concluded Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone — remained unaware of the connections between Cuba, the CIA, the Mafia and Kennedy. Only then-CIA director Allen Dulles, who was on the commission, knew, according to Hart, but Dulles said nothing to the other members.
During a day-long symposium in May 2015 featuring former Church Committee members and staff, held by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law at the Constance Milstein and Family Global Academic Center of the New York University in Washington, D.C, Hart on a panel with former Church Committee Colleague Senator Mondale, added this powerful affirmation:
” … THE THREE MAFIA FIGURES INVOLVED IN THE CASTRO PLOT WITH THE CIA. WE HEARD FROM ONE OF THEM TWICE. THE 2nd TIME – THE 1st TIME HE CAME AND WENT WITH NO PUBLIC NOTICE AT ALL. HIGHLY SECRET. THE QUESTIONS OBVIOUSLY WERE WHO ORDERED CASTRO KILLED, WHAT ROLE DID YOU PLAY SO FORTH. I FELT AT THE TIME THAT HE WAS GENERALLY FORTHCOMING HE STILL KNEW A LOT HE WASN’T TELLING US. HE WENT HOME TO MIAMI AND DISAPPEARED AND ENDED UP DEAD. HE WAS IN HIS 70s. AND MAFIA TIMES IN THOSE DAYS THAT WAS RETIREMENT. FOR THE REST OF US NOW IT’S MIDDLE-AGED. THE 2nd FIGURE WAS PROBABLY THE TOP MAFIA FIGURE IN AMERICA. PREPARED TO SUBPOENA HIM WITH THE HOUSE COMMITTEE. HE WAS KILLED IN HIS BASEMENT. KILLED IN HIS BASEMENT WITH SIX BULLET HOLES IN HIS THROAT. NEITHER OF THESE CRIMES HAVE BEEN SOLVED. NOW, BY AND LARGE THE MEDIA INCLUDED WITH THESE WERE DISMISSED AS MAFIA STUFF. THERE IS NO DOUBT IN MY MIND THEY WERE KILLED IN CONNECTION WITH OUR COMMITTEE. THE QUESTION IS WHY? WHO DID IT AND WHY? “
Sen. Richard Schweiker
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| Sen. Richard Schweiker |
Schweiker’s comments are even more explosive.
In 1975 he made the following statement to the Village Voice: “We do know Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere you look with him, there are fingerprints of intelligence.”
In 1976 he told CBS News that the CIA and FBI lied to the Warren Commission and that the case could be solved if they followed hot new leads. He also claimed that the White House was part of the cover up.
In a BBC documentary the Killing of President Kennedy he made the following blistering statement about the Warren Commission investigation:
“The Warren Commission has in fact collapsed like a house of cards and I believe it was set up at the time to feed pabulum to the American people for reasons not yet known, and one of the biggest cover-ups in the history of our country occurred at that time.”…
“The most important thing was that the intelligence agencies did all the wrong things if they were really looking for a conspiracy or to find out who killed John Kennedy.”…
“The key is why did they let him (Oswald) bring a Russian-born wife out contrary to present Russian policy, he had to get special dispensation from the highest levels to bring his Russian-born wife out, that in itself says somebody was giving Oswald highest priority either because we had trained and sent him there and they went along and pretended they did not know to fake us out, or they had in fact inculcated him and sent him back and were trying to fake us out, but he had gotten a green light no other American had gotten.”
In the documentary he goes on to say that the highest levels of government were behind him and his committee being mislead, and were continuing the cover-up and also that Oswald was clearly involved with pro-Castro and anti-Castro groups, which smacks of an intelligence role as a double agent, and that these relationships were not investigated.
In an interview Bob Tanenbaum (first Deputy Counsel for the HSCA) gave to Probe Magazine, here is how he describes an exchange he had with Schweiker where the senator directly accuses the CIA:
A: Well, it was shocking! I went up there with Cliff Fenton and Schweiker told me in his opinion the CIA was responsible for the assassination. That’s a heck of a statement to come from a United States Senator and one who had even been Ronald Reagan’s running mate in 1976, even though they didn’t make it.
A: Yeah, it was just the two of us. I was stunned! He had asked Cliff to leave and he had his own staff people leave. I had that material he had given us which contained all that information about Veciana and the Alpha 66 group and this Bishop character.
A: Well, as I said, I was stunned. Even after investigating this case, I’m not going to say that the CIA did it. He was saying it definitively. What the evidence suggested when we were in Washington was there were certain rogue elements who were involved with Bishop and others, the “plumber” types in the Nixon White House, who were involved with Oswald, who were substantially involved with anti-Castro Cubans who, the evidence suggests, were involved in the assassination. I keep saying that the evidence suggested it because we weren’t there long enough to make the case. So, there was a short-circuiting that occurred. But, that’s the area we were moving inexorably toward. And then I spoke with Gaeton Fonzi and Gaeton would corroborate this to the extent that he worked with Schweiker, he knew what Schweiker’s feelings were and he knew all about that file on Veciana. And that’s when we asked Gaeton to come on board, because he had worked on the Church senate oversight committee and he had a lot of connections that would be very helpful. And he’s a very honest guy.
Any conscientious historian who has reached this point in the article and continues to cite the Warren Commission as the key historical record in their textbooks read by unsuspecting students to conclude that Oswald acted alone, that person deserves the scorn of all who entrust academia to help shape the minds of our youth. The case against the Warren Commission made by Government officials so far is devastating; things are about to get even worse. The HSCA investigation into the assassination will turn Gerald Ford’s Gibraltar into a bowl of Jello.
[i] The JFK Assassination According to the History Textbooks, Part 1, Parts 2 and 3
[ii]http://www.history-matters.com/archive/contents/wc/contents_wr.htm
Go to Addendum
When Mark Lane’s autobiography was published in 2012, I was working on my rewrite of Destiny Betrayed. Right after that, I started in on Reclaiming Parkland. I tried to get someone else to review Citizen Lane, but there were no takers. In retrospect, I am sorry that I could not get anyone interested. And I also understand why no one in the MSM reviewed the book. It is, in quite simple terms, both a marvelous read and an inspiring story.
Too often in the JFK field, we focus solely on the work of the author or essayist on the assassination itself. In my view, this is mistaken. It’s important to me to know who an author is outside of the field. To give one example, Robert Tanenbaum—who wrote the thinly disguised roman a clef about the HSCA, Corruption of Blood—was a graduate of Boalt Hall School of Law. He then became a prosecutor under the legendary New York DA Frank Hogan. He rose to become head of the homicide division. Tanenbaum never lost a felony case in his nearly decade long career in that office. Therefore, he cannot be dismissed as a tin foil capped conspiracy theorist. The late Philip Melanson rose to become the head of the political science department at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. He then built an RFK archives at his university, the best such repository on the east coast. He wrote 12 non-fiction books, including an excellent one on the Secret Service.
In my elegy for the recently deceased Mark Lane, I alluded to some of the things he had accomplished outside the Kennedy assassination field: his work for the alleged killer of Martin Luther King, James Earl Ray; his book on the fey, chaotic Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968; and his prime role in freeing an innocent man from death row, James Richardson. Little did I know how much I was still leaving out. I, and many others, clearly shortchanged the career of a truly remarkable attorney.
I have belatedly read Lane’s autobiography, Citizen Lane. Let me say two things at the outset. Everyone should read this book. It is the testament of a man who dedicated his legal career to a lifelong crusade for the causes he believed in. And, as we will see, Lane did this almost right at the beginning of his career. It is clear that no obituary of Lane came close to doing him justice, because there seemed to be a unified MSM boycott about this book. Without reading it, no one can come close to fairly summarizing his career.
Lane was born in New York in 1927, two years before the stock market crash. His father was a CPA, and his mother was a secretary to a theatrical producer. All three of their children went to college and graduated, which is quite an achievement for that time period. Lane’s older brother became a high school mathematics teacher and a leader of the teachers union in New York. His younger sister became a history professor who eventually took over the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Virginia. She built it from virtually nothing to the point where it had fifty majors, and the areas of concentration were expanded. (See here https://news.virginia.edu/content/ann-j-lane-first-director-women-s-studies-uva-has-died)
After serving in the army in Europe during World War II, Mark Lane returned home and decided to become an attorney. He attended Brooklyn School of Law. It was founded in 1901, and is highly rated today by the National Law Journal. That particular publication rates law schools by return on investment. That is: how many of the graduates sign on with the top law firms in the United States. According to that rubric, Lane’s alma mater is in the top 15% of law academies. But Lane did not intend on cashing in on his law degree.
Lane decided that what he wanted to do was to offer legal services to those who did not have access to them but, in fact, really needed them. So he began as a member of the leftist National Lawyers Guild, and working in an office with the later congressional representative Bella Abzug. Lane started out as little more than a researcher and court stand-in for his boss when he was behind schedule. But one day he happened to walk by a court in session while the great Carol Weiss King, founder of the National Lawyers Guild, was defending a client. Lane heard her say, “Just who does this government think it is that it can violate the law with impunity, that it can traduce the rights of ordinary people, that it can tell us that the law doesn’t count because these are extraordinary times? ” (p. 27)
From that propitious moment on Lane decided he was not going to be a gopher for anyone anymore.
He now set up an office on the second level of an apartment building in Spanish Harlem. Because few other attorneys were there, people began to come to him with their most dire needs. Prior to Lane’s arrival, when there was a gang shooting, the young Latin accused of the crime almost automatically was executed or got life imprisonment. With Lane there this all changed, even in instances when the victim was white and the assailant was Puerto Rican. Lane was one of the first to assail what was called the Special Jury System. (pgs. 43-44) In New York, under these circumstances, the jury master could choose a jury, instead of having one picked at random. Therefore, the accused was not judged by a jury of his peers. Later, Lane was instrumental in getting this system abolished.
Once he developed a higher profile, Lane would set up legal clinics for the public in high school auditoriums. One of his specialties was advising local renters on how to set up tenant councils and, if necessary, conduct rent strikes. (p. 48) He even arranged to have a legal clinic at the offices of the local Hispanic newspaper. With their help, Lane helped save the concept of rent control in New York City. (p. 49)
Lane was also an active member of the National Lawyers Guild. Like many young lawyers in the late forties and fifties, Lane thought the ABA did not take a strong enough stand against Richard Nixon and the House Un-American Activities Committee or the demagogue Joe McCarthy. He volunteered to organize a benefit show for the Guild. When the main targeted performer refused to sign on, Lane went to the blacklisted folk singer Pete Seeger. Seeger invited the jazz artist Sonny Terry. Lane also invited female folk singer Martha Schlamme. Every ticket was sold, with scores of people paying for standing room only. Lane went on to do two more of these shows for Seeger. They went over so well that the young attorney briefly thought of becoming a musical impresario. (p. 36) But, lucky for us, he did not. Lane married the talented and attractive Schlamme, who unfortunately, died of a stroke in 1985.
By this time, the mid fifties, Lane had been in practice for just six years. But yet, his reputation as a champion of lost causes was so prevalent that a young man named Graciliano Acevedo walked into his office one day. He was an escapee from a young adult prison. Except it was not called a prison. It was called Wassaic State School for Mental Defectives. Acevedo began to recite a virtual horror story to the young lawyer. He told him that Wassaic was not really a school. It was a prison camouflaged as a school. Acevedo had been committed there without access to an attorney and not given a hearing or a trial. He did not want to return. He said there was no real schooling going on there, and that the guards were incompetent and sadistic and would beat up some of the prisoners. In fact, one guard actually killed an 18-year-old prisoner. (p. 58)
Lane took Acevedo to a psychiatrist. When his IQ was tested it turned out to be 115. So much for him being a mental defective. Lane decided he was not going to turn him over. He now enlisted two local reporters to his side: Fern Marja and Peter Khiss. Marja ran a three-day series on the abuses of this “school,” which culminated with an editorial plea for it to be cleaned up. Which it was. There was no more solitary confinement, books were now made available, academic tests were now given in Spanish, guards were fired (some were prosecuted), and hundreds of the inmates were released.
It is hard to believe, but at this time, Lane was just 28 years old.
Lane was interested in improving the community he worked in, as were some other talented people. So, through his defense of a parishioner, he met with the famous reverend, Eugene St. Clair Callender. After getting the young man off, he and Callender decided to work on creating a drug treatment center at the Mid-Harlem Community Parish. (p. 79) Once the two men got the center up and running, they passed its management on to one of the former patients. That center ended up treating 25,000 patients. After a meeting with baseball star Jackie Robinson, a company he was affiliated with agreed to hire some of the rehabilitated drug addicts. To culminate their success story, Lane and Callender invited a young rising star of the civil rights movement to come north and speak in Harlem. Martin Luther King spoke in front of the Hotel Theresa in 1957. Lane supplied the power for the sound system through a nearby nightclub run by boxing great Sugar Ray Robinson. (pgs. 86-87)
From social problems, Lane now turned toward the political field. The young attorney did not think the Democratic Party of New York was representing Spanish Harlem anywhere near as well as it should. So Lane decided to organize his own version of the party. He got the backing of Eleanor Roosevelt in this effort. At the beginning, he said that if he won his race for the state legislature, he would only serve one term. He then wanted to pass the seat on to a local Hispanic. With the help of his sister, brother and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Lane campaign registered over four thousand new voters. At the same time he was running for office, he was managing the local campaign of Senator John Kennedy for president.
On Election Day, his backers patrolled the ballot boxes to make sure no one from outside the district tried to vote. Lane won and celebrations broke out. As promised, after he served one term, he passed the seat on to a local Latino community organizer he knew.
At around this time, the early sixties, the struggle for civil rights was heating up to a fever pitch. The election of John Kennedy and the appointment of his brother Robert F. Kennedy as Attorney General, inspired long delayed public demonstrations to attain equality for black Americans. Callender decided to join in one of these actions, the Freedom Riders movement, by sending Lane and local black activist/lawyer Percy Sutton south to join in them. (p. 138)
In Jackson, Mississippi, before they could even participate in the protest, both men were arrested for sitting next to each other at an airport terminal. The charge was disorderly conduct. They were convicted without trial and sentenced to four months in prison. They were released on bail and promptly interviewed by the New York Times and New York Post. (p. 144) After the bad publicity, the two men returned south to stand trial. Wisely, the prosecutor moved for a directed verdict of not guilty.
We now come to a part of Citizen Lane that most of our readership will be partly familiar with. That is, Lane’s writing of his famous National Guardian essay proclaiming doubt about the guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald for the murder of President Kennedy. What inspired Lane to write his essay were the pronouncements of Dallas DA Henry Wade after Oswald had been killed. This was suspicious in itself, since Jack Ruby killed Oswald live on national TV in the basement of City Hall. In spite of that, perhaps because of it, Wade held a press conference and stated that, even though he was dead, and would not have an attorney, or a trial, Oswald was still guilty. (p. 150) Lane studied the charges levied by Wade. He now decided to respond to the DA’s bill of indictment. Although he offered his work to several outlets e.g. The Nation, Look, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, none of them would publish it. Finally, James Aronson of the left leaning National Guardian called. He had heard of the essay through the publishing grapevine. Lane told him he could have it for now, but not to publish it yet. In the meantime, he went to Jimmy Weschler of the New York Post. The Post had helped him with the Wassaic scandal, and covered his political campaign fairly. Weschler turned it down. After final approval for Aronson, it became a mini-sensation. Aronson had to publish several reprints. Weschler never spoke to Lane again. (p. 152)
This essay was not just hugely popular in America, it also began to circulate through Europe and even Japan. Therefore, with the money Aronson made through the $100 dollar sale of the rights from Lane, he arranged a speaking tour abroad for the author. With Lane’s dissident profile rising, the head of the ABA and future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wanted him disciplined because of his defense of Oswald. (p. 155) But Marguerite Oswald had read Lane’s work and wanted him to defend her deceased son, which Lane agreed to do. But the Warren Commission would not tolerate anything like that, by Lane or anyone else. In fact, following through on Powell’s suggestion, Commission Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin filed a complaint with the New York City bar. Lane had to get an attorney to represent him and the complaint was dismissed. (p. 157)
Even though Rankin would not tolerate a formal defense of Oswald before the Warren Commission, Lane now established his Citizens Commission of Inquiry (CCI) to informally investigate the Kennedy case through a wide network of volunteers. Through his lecture tours he raised enough money to fly to Dallas and talk to witnesses. He also rented a theater in New York and began to appear on college campuses. When he was invited to travel to Europe, the American embassies abroad tracked his appearances and tried to talk his backers out of their sponsorships. At one appearance in Vienna, they planted a translator who deliberately misspoke what he was saying. When the crowd started objecting, an American living there took over the duties. (p. 159)
When Lane returned to the States, he tried to get a book published based upon the Warren Report and the accompanying 26 volumes of evidence. But the FBI visited some of the prospective publishers and talked them out of working with Lane. They also visited local talk radio hosts and tried to discourage them from having him on the air. The Bureau then tapped the phones of the CCI so they would know when and where Lane would be traveling in order to investigate the case. He was also placed on the “lookout list” so that when he arrived back from a foreign speaking tour, the FBI would know he had returned.
Because he was working for nothing but expenses, and he had neglected his private law practice for the Kennedy case, Lane was extremely low on funds at this time. Finally, a British publishing house, the Bodley Head, decided to publish his manuscript called Rush to Judgment. A man named Ben Sonnenberg went to the company and volunteered his services to edit the book. When Lane saw his suggestions, he thought they were weird. It later turned out that Sonnenberg was a CIA agent who was relaying information to the Agency about what was in the book. (p. 165)
The book did well in England and the Bodley Head began to look for an American publisher. They contacted Arthur Cohen of Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Cohen was very interested but, probably through Sonnenberg, the CIA found out how explosive the book was. Although it did not implicate them, they tried to talk Cohen out of publishing the book anyway. Cohen told them if they did not leave him alone, he would double the advertising budget. (p. 165) Norman Mailer did a good review of the book in the New York Herald Tribune and the volume became a smashing best seller in America.
Lane began to tour the country from coast to coast as the book caught on like wildfire. In St. Louis, he got a phone caller on a talk show who said he wanted to talk to him offline. He then told him that he needed to talk to him out of the studio. So he directed him to a phone booth nearby. When Lane got there, he now instructed him to go to another phone booth a few miles away. Lane, who had received numerous death threats before was now getting worried. But it turned out that the caller was alerting him to an assassination attempt on his life. He told Lane that this would take place in Chicago, outside of a hotel room he would be staying in and he actually gave him the room number he would be at. He then added that there would be a studio across the street. Lane would cross the street to get there at a precise time, and then there would be an attempt to run him over with a truck. (p. 169) Lane asked him how he knew all of these details. The man said that he had been hired to drive the truck, but he refused to kill an American on American soil. He then added that he would now send a taxi to pick Lane up and return him to his hotel, which he knew the name of. When Lane got to Chicago, all the details the assassin told him were accurate. So he changed his room number, and then arrived at the interview via a circuitous route.
| {aridoc engine=”iframe” width=”560″ height=”315″}https://www.youtube.com/embed/3XoAg-FeU9I?rel=0&showinfo=0{/aridoc} |
| Mark Lane appears on Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. Although many people had been skeptical of the Warren Report’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of President Kennedy, Lane’s book Rush to Judgment was the first to lay out the argument seriously. He defends himself ably in this spirited exchange. |
After Rush to Judgment became a national bestseller, documentary film director Emile De Antonio got in contact with him to a do a film based upon the book. So the two traveled to Dallas to interview some witnesses. One of them, Sam Holland, told them that he had been alerted in advance about them coming. And he had also been told by the police not to talk to them. Further, he had been threatened with the loss of his job if he did so. When Lane asked him if those were the circumstances, then why he was talking to him, Holland replied with words that have become hallowed in the annals of JFK assassination literature: “When the time comes that an American sees his president being killed and he can’t tell the truth about it, that’s the time to give the country back to the Indians—if they’ll take it.” As Lane reports, Holland had tears in his eyes as he said this.
I should add one more detail about their work on this film, one that does not come from this book, but from Lane’s 1968 volume A Citizen’s Dissent. While at work on the film, the two struck a deal with CBS to look at their outtakes from their 1964 two-hour special on the Warren Report. The first night they watched five hours of film. They understood it would eventually run to 70 hours—for a two-hour documentary? Lane and De Antonio found something shocking that first night. CBS was, as Lane put it, filming from a script. If any witness diverted from that scenario, the interviewer yelled cut. The witness was then instructed with new information so as to alter their answer for the camera. The witness then gave the revised answer. Only the rehearsed parts were shown to the public. Needless to say, after their first night, CBS called the librarian and said the agreement they had was null and void. (Mark Lane, A Citizen’s Dissent, pgs. 75-79)
While on a speaking tour in northern California in 1968, Lane picked up a magazine and read the story of James Joseph Richardson. Richardson was a resident of Arcadia, Florida, who was charged with killing his seven children with poison. (Citizen Lane, p. 187) Lane happened to have another speaking engagement upcoming in Florida. While there, he found that Richardson had been convicted. Lane got in contact with Richardson’s attorney and then with Richardson. After this he and three of his friends and working associates—Carolyn Mugar, Steve Jaffe and Dick Gregory—conducted an eight-month investigation, after which he published a book about the case called, appropriately, Arcadia. This managed to attract some attention to the case and place some pressure on local officials.
The book strongly suggested that Richardson had been framed and that the local police chief and the DA had cooperated in manufacturing evidence. This turned out to be the case. Lane got TV host David Frost interested in the case and he did a jailhouse interview with Richardson. Dick Gregory got a story in Newsweek. Lane called a press conference on the steps of the state capital after he had acquired a copy of the master case file. These documents proved the accusations he had made in his book. The governor now ordered a special hearing into the case and the new facts were now entered into the record. Janet Reno had been assigned the case as a special prosecutor. Lane was allowed to make his case to vacate the previous judgment. Reno made a short presentation which, in essence, agreed with all the facts Lane had presented. She also agreed the verdict should be vacated. The judge agreed also and Richardson was set free. (pgs. 206-07) Lane later called the day Richardson was freed after 21 years of incarceration the greatest day of his professional life.
Mark Lane (left) with Jane Fonda |
It would seem almost destined that an attorney like Lane would get involved with the long and arduous attempt to end the Vietnam War. Lane did. With actress Jane Fonda and actor Donald Sutherland, he helped arrange the famous Winter Soldier Investigation. This was a three-day conference in Detroit in 1971. It was designed to publicize the atrocities and crimes that the Pentagon had committed in its futile attempt to defeat the Viet Cong and the regular army of North Vietnam. A documentary film was made of the event and the transcript was entered into the Congressional Record by Sen. Mark Hatfield.
Both President Richard Nixon and his assistant Charles Colson despised the conference, as did the Pentagon and the FBI. They therefore began counter measures to neutralize its impact. Lane wrote a book about the subject called Conversations with Americans. Consulting with the Pentagon, New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan wrote an article saying that since some of Lane’s interviewees were not listed in Pentagon records, then the persons must be ersatz. When Lane tried to call Sheehan and enlighten him on this issue, Sheehan never returned his calls. Lane understood that some of the soldiers would not want their actual names entered into the book for fear of retaliation. Therefore, he had entered the real information about the subjects on a chart and given this information to a former lawyer for the Justice Department. (See pages 219-221) Sheehan apparently never wanted this information. And neither does former professor John McAdams because he still runs a link to Sheehan’s false article to discredit Lane.
Neil Sheehan was a former acolyte of Col. John Paul Vann. Vann had been part of the American advisory group that President Kennedy had sent to Vietnam to assist the ARVN. Vann became convinced the war could not be won unless direct American intervention was applied. In this, he was in agreement with New York Times reporter in Vietnam, David Halberstam. Kennedy disliked them both since he had no intention of inserting American combat troops in Indochina. Somehow, 42 years after the fall of Saigon, McAdams still does not understand what made it such a disaster. It was partly because of writers like Sheehan and military men like Vann.
But that is not all Lane did to try and stop the war. He also read up on the laws concerning conscientious objectors and provided counseling to scores of young men who wanted to use that aspect of the law to either avoid service or leave the service. (p. 236) In addition to that, because Lane had achieved a high profile on the war, one day a Vietnamese pilot training in Texas got in contact with him. He said he did not want to be part of these Vietnamese Air Force missions, since most of them targeted civilians. So he asked Lane if he could be granted political asylum in America so as not to go back and do bombing runs. Lane did some work on the issue. He told him that he did not think he would be successful petitioning for asylum in America, but he thought he could do so in Canada. Therefore, along with his lifelong friend Carolyn Mugar, the two set up a kind of underground railroad into Canada. Carolyn would stop her station wagon before the border checkpoint. Lane and the man he calls Tran (along with two other trainees) jumped out of the car and circled around into a snowy, thin forest. After Carolyn passed the border, she then drove along a narrow road to pick up the pair on the Canadian side. Because of its success, Lane duplicated this along with Mugar several times. He later talked to a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman who said that they were on to what he was doing. but they actually were in agreement with him. (p. 283)
One of the most gripping chapters in the book is Lane’s description of his participation in the defense of Russell Means and Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement (AIM) during the siege at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973. AIM had organized an effort to impeach tribal president Richard Wilson who they felt was a totally corrupt pawn who was actually abusing the tribe. The area was cordoned off with FBI agents and US Marshals. During the siege, several people were shot and at least one disappeared. After the siege was lifted, Banks and Means went on trial for conspiracy and assault. They were defended respectively by Lane and William Kunstler.
The trial began in January of 1974. Lane motioned for a change of venue to St. Paul, Minnesota, which the court granted. It became very obvious early on that the FBI had illegally wiretapped the phone at the reservation and that they had suborned perjury from their star witness. (p. 267) Although one of the jurors became ill before a final verdict was voted on, the judge accepted an acquittal to one charge and threw out the other because of prosecutorial misconduct. That ruling was accepted on appeal.
Most of us know about Lane’s participation in the Martin Luther King case. He and Dick Gregory wrote a good book about the murder of King. It was originally titled Code Name Zorro and then reissued as Murder In Memphis. In this volume, Lane only discusses his work with Grace Stephens. Stephens was at Bessie’s Boarding House with her common law husband, Charlie Stephens, when King was shot. She saw a man run out of the communal bathroom. Yet, she would not say it was James Earl Ray, the accused assassin, even though she was sober and got a good look at him. Charlie was stone drunk at the time and was not a witness to the man running out. He did not even have his glasses on. (p. 290) But since he would say it was Ray, he was used as a witness to extradite the alleged assassin from England.
When Lane started investigating the case, he asked around for Grace. No one knew where she was or why she was never called as a witness. Finally, Lane got some information that she was squirreled away in a sanitarium. He went there and looked for her. When he found her, he sat down next to her, took out a tape recorder, and asked her about the man she saw. She said she did get a good look at him. And when she was shown pictures of Ray, it was not him. Lane left the place and then played the tape on local Memphis radio. He then got a hearing called in order to free Grace Stephens. (p. 294)
In the fall of 1978, Lane was asked by his friend Donald Freed to go to Jonestown in Guyana. James Jones wanted Freed to lecture there on the King case. Freed figured that since Lane knew much more about it than he did, he would let him do the talking. Lane was well received and he was invited back in November. Before he left, he got a call from a congressional lawyer in Washington. He inquired about how many news media would be there, and if the congressional delegations of Leo Ryan and Ed Derwinski would be small. He was assured that there would be no media and that just one assistant would accompany both congressmen. (p. 305) He had inquired about this because he felt that if everything was kept small scale, he could serve as a mediator if Jones got too paranoid about being investigated. Lane was either misinformed or he was lied to on both points.
Jones did feel threatened by the rather large delegation and Lane could not control things. After watching and intervening in a murder attempt on congressman Ryan, Lane advised the representative from northern California to leave the scene. Jones had seen Ryan bloodied and the newsmen were trying to take photos. (p. 310) Lane convinced Ryan to go. He told him he would interview the people his constituents were inquiring about.
After Ryan left for the airport—where he and others would be killed on the tarmac—Lane and the People’s Temple lawyer Charles Garry were placed in a cell. Lane talked to one of his guards and convinced him that he would be the perfect author to tell the truth about the colony. Miraculously, the two lawyers made it through the jungle to Port Kaituma where they were rescued by the military. They then sought refuge in the American Embassy. Lane concludes this chapter by agreeing with most authors: Jonestown was not a mass suicide. It was at least partly a mass murder. (Please read Jim Hougan’s three-part series on Jones to gain some understanding of what really happened at Jonestown http://jimhougan.com/JimJones.html)
As shown in the video clip above, many people know that Mark Lane opposed William F. Buckley on his show Firing Line about the JFK case. What very few people knew, including me, was that Lane also opposed him in court on four counts of defamation. Buckley had sued Willis Carto for libel because he had called him a neo-fascist and a racist. Carto’s first lawyer took a powder on him and so he turned to Lane in desperation: Buckley was requesting $16 million dollars in damages. Even though the judge was clearly biased towards Buckley, Lane did very well. He simply used words that Buckley had written in his own magazine, National Review to show that Buckley had clearly sided with the forces of segregation in the south way past the time when King and Rosa Parks began their campaign to integrate the area. He also showed that Buckley encouraged the prosecution of African American congressman Adam Clayton Powell, and that he was also in favor of the poll tax. The $16 million was reduced to $1,001.00. (pgs. 321-28)
It is also instructive to compare the work Lane did in life with what the counsels of the Warren commission did. Did David Belin ever take on a case of abusive landlords? Did Wesley Liebeler ever hold free legal clinics on how to organize rent strikes? Not to my knowledge.
Two other things I did not know about Lane that are in this book. He successfully argued a case before the Supreme Court against Jack Anderson. This again involved a libel case in which Anderson had libeled Carto. The district judge had thrown the case out. Lane argued it should be reinstated. He won the case and Carto settled for a withdrawal of the charges and a token payment to a charitable cause. (p. 336)
Second, Lane had a radio show. He made an appearance on a radio program in New Jersey in 2004 to talk about the JFK case. He did so well that he was invited back. He was then offered a job five days a week, which he declined. But he agreed to do the show once a week with a co–host. The show was called Lane’s Law and I really wish I had known about it since it sounds very funny. Lane had a great time making fun of pompous fools like Sen. Bill Frist. (p. 346)
When Lane’s sister Anne became ill and had to resign her Department Chair at Virginia, Lane moved to Charlottesville to be close to her. She later recovered and moved to New York to attend her children and grandchildren. Mark decided to stay in Virginia. Coincidentally, all three siblings passed away in a period of four years, from 2012-16.
Unlike what Bob Katz once wrote about him, Mark Lane was not an ambulance chaser. In each high profile case he entered, he was requested to do so: from the JFK case to the Buckley case, and all of them in between, including Wounded Knee and the King case. It is also instructive to compare the work Lane did in life with what the counsels of the Warren commission did. Did David Belin ever take on a case of abusive landlords? Did Wesley Liebeler ever hold free legal clinics on how to organize rent strikes? Not to my knowledge.
Mark Lane was such an effective defense lawyer he could have made millions a la Dick DeGuerin defending the likes of Robert Durst. Instead, he decided to be an attorney for the wretched and the damned. A counsel for the downtrodden and the lost. But they happened to be, like Wounded Knee and the JFK case, just causes. And Lane acquitted himself well, considering the forces arrayed against him. I know of very few lawyers who could have written a book like this one. Lane’s life stands out as a man who did what he could to correct the evil and injustice in the world around him, with no target being too small or too large in that regard. This book stands out like a beacon in the night. It shows both what a citizen should be, and what an attorney can be. Buy it today.
When Warren Commission critic Roger Feinman passed away in the fall of 2011, he was freelancing as a computer programmer. That was not his original choice for a profession. Roger started out in life as a journalist. In fact, while in college, he actually submitted reports on campus anti-war disturbances to local radio stations. When he graduated, he got a job at the local New York City independent television station WPIX. In 1972, at the rather young age of 24, he began working for CBS News in New York. There, among other things, he assisted in producing “The CBS World News Roundup with Dallas Townsend.” Under normal circumstances, Roger could have expected a long career at CBS, a few promotions, a nice salary, a munificent benefits package, and a generous pension. He never got any of that. In fact, he was terminated by his employers in the fall of 1976.
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| Roger Feinman |
Why? Because in 1975, Roger saw the CBS News Department preparing for another multi-part special defending the Warren Report. The reader should be aware that this was the third time in 11 years that CBS had used its immense media influence to propagandize the public into thinking all was right with the official version of President Kennedy’s assassination. Back in 1964, upon the Warren Report’s initial release—actually the evening of the day it was published—CBS preempted regular programming. Walter Cronkite, assisted by Dan Rather, devoted two commercial-free hours to endorsing the main tenets of that report.
But something happened right after Cronkite and Rather did their public commemoration. Other people, who were not in the employ of the MSM, also looked at the report and the accompanying 26 volumes. Some of them were lawyers, some were professors, e.g., Vincent Salandria and Richard Popkin. They came to the conclusion that CBS had been less than rigorous in its review. By 1967, the analyses opposing the conclusions of both CBS and the Warren Report had become numerous and widespread. Books by Edward Epstein, Mark Lane, Sylvia Meagher and Josiah Thompson had now entered into public debate. Some of them became best sellers. Thompson’s book, Six Seconds in Dallas, was excerpted and placed on the cover of the wide circulation magazine Saturday Evening Post. Lane was actually appearing on popular talk shows. Jim Garrison had announced a reopening of the JFK case in New Orleans. The dam was threatening to break.
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Therefore, in the summer of 1967, CBS again came to the aid of the official story. They now prepared a four-hour, four night, extravaganza to, again, endorse the findings of the Warren Commission. As in 1964, Cronkite manned the anchor desk and Rather was the main field reporter. And again, CBS could find no serious problems with the Warren Report. The critics were misguided, CBS said. Walter and Dan had done a seven-month inquiry. At the time of broadcast, it was the most expensive documentary CBS ever had produced. And they found the following: Acting alone, Oswald killed President Kennedy and police officer J. D. Tippit. Acting alone, Jack Ruby killed Oswald. And Oswald and Ruby did not know each other. All the controversy was Much Ado about Nothing. Cronkite was going to “shed light” on these questions for those in the public who were confused.
To show how much “light” Cronkite was going to shed, he began the first installment by saying that there was no question that Oswald ordered the rifle in evidence. Yet, as John Armstrong and others have shown, there are many doubts about whether or not Oswald ordered this rifle. Apparently, among other things, Walter and Dan didn’t notice that the money order allegedly used to pay for the rifle never went through the Federal Reserve system.
Eight years after this broadcast, in 1975, two events occurred to raise interest in the JFK case again. First, the Church Committee was formed to explore the crimes of the CIA and FBI. The committee revealed that, way before Kennedy was killed, the CIA had farmed out the assassination of Fidel Castro to the Mafia. Yet, the Warren Commission was never told about this. Even though Allen Dulles—the CIA Director when these plots were formulated—was on the Commission. Secondly, in the summer of 1975, in primetime, ABC broadcast the Zapruder film. This was the first time that the American public had seen the shocking image of President Kennedy being hurled back and to the left by what appeared to be a shot from his front and right. A shot Oswald could not have fired. The confluence of these two events caused a furor in Washington. A congressional resolution was passed to form the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), a reopening of the JFK case.
CBS decided they were going to try and influence the outcome of the HSCA in advance. So they now prepared still another special about the JFK case. (And since the congressional resolution forming the HSCA sanctioned an inquiry into the Martin Luther King case also, CBS was going to a do a special on that assassination too.)
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| Richard Salant, former president of CBS |
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| William J. Small, former president of NBC News and executive with CBS for 17 years |
There was a small problem. Roger Feinman had become a friend and follower of the estimable Warren Commission critic Sylvia Meagher. Therefore, he knew that 1) The Warren Commission produced a deeply flawed report, and 2) CBS had employed some questionable methods in the 1967 special in order to conceal those flaws. Since Roger was working there in 1975, he began to write some memoranda to those in charge warning them that they had repeated their poor 1967 performance in November of 1975. His first memo went to CBS president Dick Salant. Many of the other memos were directed to the Office of Standards and Practices.
In preparing these memos Roger had researched some of the rather odd methodologies that CBS used in 1967, and again in 1975. Since, in 1975, he had been there for three years, he got to know some of the people who had worked on that series. They supplied him with documents and information which revealed that what Cronkite and Rather were telling the audience had been arrived at through a process that was as flawed as the one the Warren Commission had used. Roger requested a formal review of the process by which CBS had arrived at its forensic conclusions. He felt the documentary had violated company guidelines in doing so.
As Roger’s memos began to circulate through the executive and management suites—including Salant’s and Vice-President Bill Small’s—it was made clear to him that he should cease and desist from his one-man campaign. But he would not let up. CBS now moved to terminate their dissident employee.
On September 7, 1976, CBS succeeded in terminating Roger Feinman. But the collection of documents he secured through his sources was, to my knowledge, absolutely unprecedented. This remarkable evidence allowed us, for the first time, to see how the 1967 series was conceived and executed. But further, it takes us into the group psychology of a large media corporation when it collides with controversial matters of national security.
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| Daniel Schorr |
One of the most remarkable discoveries Roger made was this: the initial proposal for the special was made from certain employees inside CBS. The proposal was originally sent to Salant by CBS Vice-President at the time, Gordon Manning. Two men who had relayed the idea to him were Daniel Schorr and Bill Small. Later on, Les Midgley would join the effort.
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| Gordon Manning, executive at CBS, NBC and Newsweek |
Small was the CBS Washington Bureau Chief from 1962-74 who was now vice-president. Schorr had joined CBS in 1953 and worked under the legendary Edward R. Murrow as a reporter. Manning was hired away from Newsweek to CBS by executive Fred Friendly in 1964. By 1967 he had also become a vice-president. Midgley had also started in print media. But by 1963, he had become a top prime time news producer at CBS.
The first proposal was sent to Salant by Manning in August of 1966. It was declined. Manning tried again in October. This time he suggested an open debate between the critics of the Warren Report and former Commission counsels. It would be moderated by a law school dean or the president of the ABA.
One month after Manning’s debate proposal, Life Magazine published a front-page story in which they questioned the Warren Commission verdict with photographic evidence from the Zapruder film (which they owned). They also interviewed Texas Governor John Connally who disagreed that he and Kennedy had been hit by the same shot. That idea, the Single Bullet Theory, was the fulcrum of the Warren Report. Without it, the Commission’s verdict was rendered spurious. The story ended with a call to reopen the case. In fact, Life had actually put together a small journalistic team to do their own internal investigation.
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| Les Midgley, CBS producer |
A few days after this issue appeared, Manning again pressed for a CBS special. This time he suggested the title, “The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald”. Here, a panel of law school deans would review the evidence against Oswald in a mock trial setting. Including evidence that the Warren Commission had not included.
At this time, Manning was joined by producer Les Midgley. Midgley had produced the two-hour 1964 CBS special. His suggestion differed from Manning’s. He wanted to title the show “The Warren Report on Trial”. Midgley suggested a three night, three-hour series. One night would be given over to the commission defenders, one night would include all the witnesses the commission overlooked or discounted. The last night would include a verdict conducted by legal experts. On December 1, 1966, Salant wrote a memo to John Schneider, president of CBS Broadcast Group. He told him that he might refer the proposal to the CNEC. That acronym stood for CBS News Executive Committee. According to information Roger gained through discovering secret memos, plus through secondary sources, CNEC was a secretive group that was created in the wake of Edward R. Murrow’s departure from CBS.
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| Edward R. Murrow |
Murrow was a true investigative reporter who became famous through his reports on Senator Joe McCarthy and the treatment of migrant farm workers. The upper management at CBS did not like the controversy that these reports attracted from certain segments of the American power structure. After all, they were part of that structure. Salant went to Exeter Academy, Harvard, and then Harvard Law School. He had been handpicked from the network’s Manhattan legal firm by CBS President Frank Stanton to join his management team. From 1961-67, Stanton was chairman of Rand Corporation, a CIA associated think tank. During World War 2, Stanton worked in the Office of War Information, the psychological warfare branch. President Eisenhower had appointed Stanton to a small committee to organize how the USA would survive in case of nuclear attack. The other two members of CNEC were Sig Mickelson and founder Bill Paley. Mickelson had preceded Salant as president of CBS News. He then became director of Time-Life Broadcasting. Mickelson said nothing when founder Bill Paley—who had also served in the psywar branch of the Office of War Information, in World War 2—met with CIA Director Allen Dulles and agreed to have CBS overseas correspondents informally debriefed by the Agency.
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| Frank Stanton, former CBS president and chairman of the Rand Corporation from 1961-67 |
When Salant had reached his crossroads with CNEC, the writing was on the wall for any fair minded, objective treatment of the JFK case at CBS. For as Roger wrote, “The establishment of CNEC effectively curtailed the news division’s independence.” Further, Salant had no journalistic experience and was in almost daily communication with Stanton. As Roger further wrote, Salant “frequently exercised editorial supervision over CBS news broadcasts.” And further, his memoirs did not mention the supervision of CNEC. Or the Warren Commission documentaries made under his watch. These hidden facts “belied Salant’s frequent public assertions of CBS News’ independence from corporate influence.”
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| Sig Mickelson, former president of CBS News and director of Time-Life Broadcasting |
The day after Salant informed the CNEC about the proposal, he told Manning that he was wavering on the mock trial concept. Salant’s next move was even more ominous. He sent both Manning and Midgley to California to talk to two lawyers about the project. One of the attorneys was Edwin Huddleson, a partner in the San Francisco firm of Cooley, Godward, Castro and Huddleson. Huddleson attended Harvard Law with Salant. Like Stanton he was on the board of Rand Corporation. The other lawyer the men saw was Bayless Manning, Dean of Stanford Law School. Both men told the CBS representatives that they were against the network undertaking the project on the grounds of “the national interest” and because of “political implications”. Gordon Manning reported that both attorneys advised them to ignore the critics of the Warren Commission, or to even appoint a panel to critique their books. Huddleson even recommended having scientist Luis Alvarez as a consultant to counter the critics. Which CBS actually did.
On his return to CBS headquarters, Gordon Manning realized what was happening. He suggested a new title for the series, “In Defense of the Warren Report”. He now wrote that CBS should dismiss “the inane, irresponsible, and hare-brained challenges of Mark Lane and others of that stripe.” Gordon Manning’s defection left Midgley out on a limb. Salant, with the help of the White House, was about to cut it off. (Bayless Manning had played a significant role in reversing the aim of the program. It is perhaps of interest here to note that in 1971, David Rockefeller made Bayless Manning first president of the Council on Foreign Relations.)
Unaware of what Salant was up to, on December 14, 1966, Midgley circulated a memo about how he planned on approaching the Warren Report project. He proposed running experiments that were more scientific than “the ridiculous ones run by the FBI.” He still wanted a mock trial to show how the operation of the Commission was “almost incredibly inadequate.”
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| William S. Paley, creator of CBS television, and founder of CNEC |
In response, Salant now circulated an anonymous, undated, paragraph-by-paragraph rebuttal to Midgley’s attack. The secret author of that memo was none other than Warren Commissioner John McCloy—then Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. Ellen McCloy, his daughter, was Salant’s administrative assistant. In this memo, McCloy wrote that “the chief evidence that Oswald acted alone and shot alone is not to be found in the ballistics and pathology of the assassination, but in the fact of his loner life.” [emphasis added] As most Warren Commission critics had written, it was this approach—discounting or ignoring the medical and ballistics evidence, but concentrating on Oswald’s alleged social life—that was the fatal flaw of the Warren Report. From this point on, Ellen McCloy would be on the distribution list for almost all memos related to the Kennedy assassination project. She would now serve as the secret back channel between CBS and her father in regards to the production and substance of the project.
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| John J. McCloy. His daughter, Ellen, who was Salant’s administrative assistant, admitted to acting as his clandestine liason with CBS during the production of the 1967 Warren Report special. |
Clearly, the tide had turned and Salant was now in McCloy’s corner. For Salant then asks producer Midgley, “Is the question whether Oswald was a CIA or FBI informant really so substantial that we have to deal with it?” Midgley, still alone out on the limb, replies, “Yes, we must treat it.”
This clandestine relationship between Salant and McCloy was known to very few people in 1967. In fact, as Feinman later deduced, it was likely known only to the very small circle in the memo distribution chain. That Salant deliberately wished to keep it hidden is indicated by the fact that he allowed McCloy to write these early memos anonymously. For as Feinman also concluded, McCloy’s influence on the program was almost certainly a violation of the network’s own guidelines. Which is probably another reason Salant kept it hidden. In fact, as we will see, Salant was actually in denial about the relationship.
After Feinman was terminated he briefly thought of publicizing the whole affair (which he eventually decided against doing). So he wrote McCloy in March of 1977 about the CFR chair’s clandestine role in the four night special. McCloy declined to be interviewed on the subject. He also added that he did not recall any contribution he made to the special.
But Feinman persisted. About three weeks later, on April 4, 1977, he wrote McCloy again. This time he revealed that he had written evidence that McCloy had participated extensively in the production of the four night series. Very quickly, McCloy now got in contact with Salant. McCloy wrote that he did not recall any such back channel relationship. Salant then contacted Midgley. He told the producer to check his files to see if there was any evidence that would reveal the CBS secret collaboration with McCloy. Salant wrote back to McCloy saying that at no time did Ellen McCloy ever act as a conduit between CBS News and McCloy.
This, of course, was false. And in 1992, in an article for The Village Voice, both Ellen McCloy and Salant were confronted with memos that revealed Salant was lying in 1977. McCloy’s daughter admitted to the clandestine courier relationship. Salant finally admitted it also, but he tried to say there was nothing unusual about it. Which leaves the obvious question: If that were the case then why was it kept secret from almost everyone? Including the public. (See further “JFK: How the Media Assassinated the Real Story”)
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| Betty Furness doing a Westinghouse ad |
As alluded to previously, there was still work to be done with the last holdout, producer Les Midgley. While the four-night special was in production, Midgley became engaged to one Betty Furness. Furness was a former actress turned television commercial spokesperson. At this time, President Lyndon Johnson now appointed her his special assistant for consumer affairs. Even though her only experience in the field had been selling Westinghouse appliances for eleven years on television. She was sworn in on April 27, 1967, about two months before the CBS production first aired. Two weeks after it was broadcast, Midgley and Furness were married. We should note here, as Kai Bird’s biography of McCloy, The Chairman, makes clear, Johnson and McCloy were both friends and colleagues.
But there is another point to be made about how Midgley was convinced to go along with McCloy’s view of the Warren Commission. Around the same time he was married to Furness, he received a significant promotion. He was now made the executive editor of the network’s flagship news program, “The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite”. This made him, in essence, the number one news editor at CBS. Such a decision could not have been made without consultation between Salant, Cronkite and Stanton. And very likely the CNEC.
We have now seen—in unprecedented detail—how the executive level of CBS completely altered a proposal to present a fair and balanced program about the murder of President Kennedy to the public, and at a very sensitive time in history. Consulting with their lawyers, they decided such a program would not be in “the national interest” and would have “political implications”. We have also seen how the president of CBS News secretly brought in a consultant, John McCloy, whose participation was a violation of the standards and practices of the network. We have seen how both McCloy and Salant then lied about this secret back channel, which was never revealed to the public. We have also seen how Gordon Manning and Les Midgley, through a combination of the carrot and stick treatment, were made to go along with the Salant/McCloy, CNEC agenda.
We should now look at the impact this secret relationship would have on what CBS was going to broadcast to an unsuspecting public. For their widely trumpeted “examination” of the Warren Report was anything but.
In the first part of this article we saw that, as the controversy over the JFK assassination rose in 1966, some employees at CBS News wanted to deal with the subject in a fair and objective way. Specifically, in either a debate or mock trial format, with both sides—both critics and advocates of the Warren Report—represented equally. But CBS President Richard Salant, in consultation with the CNEC—the secret executive committee at CBS—took control of this proposal, and more or less hijacked it. Salant and the CNEC brought in his own consultant to the proposal. One who would not abide by the critics being allowed a fair and equal voice in this debate. Former Warren Commissioner John McCloy would now have a powerful voice about the upcoming special. His back channel to the show would be through his daughter, Ellen McCloy, who worked for Salant. Not only would this be kept under wraps, but also when CBS moved to terminate Roger Feinman in 1975, Salant would deny any such relationship.
Once McCloy was brought on board, the complexion of both CBS and their programs—both in 1967 and 1975—were altered. The amount of time given over to the critics of the Warren Report would be severely curtailed. But beyond that, CBS would now employ other consultants, besides McCloy, for both their 1967 and 1975 programs. Men who would be rabidly pro-Warren Report. Some of them would appear on the shows as guest speakers. Some would be hidden in the shadows. But in no case would CBS make clear just how biased these men were. In addition to the clandestine role of McCloy, some of these consultants included Dallas police officer Gerald Hill, reporter Lawrence Schiller, physicist Luis Alvarez, and urologist John Lattimer.
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| Gerald Hill |
Gerald Hill was just about everywhere in Dallas on November 22, 1963. He was at the Texas School Book Depository, he was at the murder scene of Officer J. D. Tippit, and he was at the Texas Theater—the place where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested. Hill appears on the 1967 show as a speaker. But Roger Feinman found out that Hill was paid for six weeks work on the 1967 show as a consultant. During his consulting, Hill revealed that the police did a “fast frisk” on Oswald while in the theater. They found nothing in his pockets at the time. Which poses the question as to where the bullets the police said they found in his pockets later at the station came from. That question did not arise during the program, since CBS never revealed that statement. (Click here and go to page 20 of the transcript.)
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| John Lattimer |
During World War II, John Lattimer traveled with Patton’s Third Army across France. He treated the wounded during the D-Day invasion. At the end of the war, he was the court-appointed doctor for the Nazis accused of war crimes at Nuremburg. As researcher Milicent Cranor discovered, Lattimer was J. Edgar Hoover’s physician. Fittingly then, he had been defending the Commission since at least 1966 in the pages of the Journal of the American Medical Association. In 1972, he became the first doctor allowed to enter the National Archives and inspect the autopsy evidence in the JFK case. He reaffirmed the Warren Commission verdict without telling the public that Kennedy’s brain was missing from the archives. In 1975, Dr. James Weston was the on-camera witness for the medical evidence. Lattimer consulted with Weston and prepared some visual aids for him. Lattimer spent a large part of his career writing articles and performing dubious experiments propping up the Warren Report. (Click here, and here)
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| Luis Alvarez |
Luis Alvarez worked on refinements in radar detection during World War II. He then had a role on the Manhattan Project. He actually witnessed the destruction of Hiroshima from an observation plane, the B-29 The Great Artiste. In 1953, Alvarez was on a CIA-appointed study group for UFO’s called the Robertson Panel. In the sixties, he was part of the JASON Advisory Group; this was a powerful organization of top-level scientists that advised the military on things like fighting the Vietnam War. Along with people like Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and George Schultz, he was a member of the secretive and quite conservative Republican private club, the Bohemian Grove. Alvarez was part of the Ruina Panel, which was put together to conceal evidence of Israel exploding nuclear devices. (Click here) Like Lattimer, Alvarez spent a considerable amount of time lending his name to articles and questionable experiments supporting the Warren Report. In fact, as demonstrated by authors like Josiah Thompson (in 2013) and Gary Aguilar (in 2014), Alvarez actually misrepresented his data in some of his JFK experiments. (Click here and go to the 37:00 mark for Aguilar’s presentation.)
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| Lawrence Schiller |
The same year of the 1967 CBS broadcast, Lawrence Schiller had co-written a book entitled The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report. This was a picaresque journey through America where Schiller interviewed some of the prominent—and not so prominent—critics of the report and caricatured them hideously. The book was simultaneously published in hardcover and softcover, and was also accompanied by an LP record album. But this constituted only Schiller’s overt actions on the JFK case. Secretly, he had been an informant for the FBI for many years on people like Mark Lane and Jim Garrison. These documents were not declassified until the Assassination Records and Reviews Board was set up in the nineties. (See Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, by James DiEugenio, p. 388) How bad was Schiller? He attacked New Orleans DA Jim Garrison even though he himself had discovered witnesses who attested that Garrison’s suspect, Clay Shaw, actually used the alias of Clay Bertrand. Which was a major part of Garrison’s case against the man. (ibid)
As the reader can see, with this cast of consultants, the 1967 CBS Special was wrongly titled as “A CBS News Inquiry: The Warren Report”. For the last thing these four men, plus McCloy, wanted to do was to unearth the methodology and process by which the Warren Commission had come to its conclusions. For if that had been done, the results would have shown just how superficial, how haphazard, how agenda-driven the Commission really was. What CBS was going to do was—come hell or high water—endorse the Warren Report. And this became obvious right at the start of the program in the summer of 1967.
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| Walter Cronkite |
For instance, Walter Cronkite intoned that, as a crowd of people rejoiced at the sight of President Kennedy approaching Dealey Plaza, “another waited”. Cronkite then said that, faced with dangerous conditions, President Johnson appointed the Warren Commission. Yet, Johnson never wanted a blue ribbon panel from Washington. He wanted a Texas-based investigation founded upon an FBI report. People outside the White House, like Yale Law School Dean Eugene Rostow and columnist Joseph Alsop, foisted the idea of the Warren Commission upon him. (see The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 7-16) Cronkite then names the men on the Warren Commission while showing their pictures on screen, affirming that this inquiry would be made “by men of unimpeachable credentials”. Needless to say, Cronkite does not mention the fact that President Kennedy had fired Commissioner Allen Dulles in 1961 for lying to him about the Bay of Pigs.
Cronkite then got to the crux of the program. After stating that the Warren Report assured the public the most searching investigation in history had taken place, he now began to show books and articles that were critical of the Commission. He then revealed certain polling results that demonstrated a majority of Americans had lost faith in the Warren Report. This signalled what the program had now become. It was the first network special that took aim at the work of those critical of the Warren Commission. Its raison d’être was to take on the work of the critics and reassure the public that these people could not be trusted. They had given the Warren Report a bum rap.
Cronkite then went through a list of points that the critics had surfaced after reading the report and its 26 volumes of evidence. These were:
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To shorten a four-hour story: CBS sided with the Warren Report on each point. Oswald fired three shots from the sixth floor with the rifle attributed to him by the Warren Commission. Two of three were direct hits—to the head and shoulder area—within six seconds. Not only that, but using men like Alvarez they came up with novel new ways to endorse the Warren Report. But as we shall see, and as Feinman discovered, CBS was not candid about these newly modified methods.
One way that CBS fortified the case for just three shots was Alvarez’ examination of the Zapruder film—which the program did not actually show. This was Abraham Zapruder’s 26-second film of Kennedy’s assassination taken from his position in Dealey Plaza. Alvarez proclaimed for CBS that by doing something called a “jiggle analysis”, he computed that there were three shots fired during the film. What this amounted to was a blurring of frames on the film.
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| Dan Rather |
Dan Rather took this Alvarez idea to a Mr. Charles Wyckoff, a professional photo analyst in Massachusetts. Agreeing with Alvarez, at least on camera, Wyckoff mapped out the three areas of “jiggles”. The Alvarez/Wyckoff formula was simple: three jiggles, three shots. But as Feinman found out through unearthed memos, there was a big problem with this declaration. Wyckoff had actually discovered four jiggles, not three. Therefore, by the Alvarez formula, there was a second gunman, and a conspiracy. But as the entire executive management level of CBS had committed to McCloy and the Warren Report, this could not be disclosed to the public. Therefore Wyckoff’s on-camera discussion of this was cut out and not included in the official transcript. It is interesting to note just how committed Wyckoff was to the CBS agenda, for he tried to explain the fourth jiggle as Zapruder’s reaction to a siren. As Feinman noted, how Wyckoff could determine this from a silent 8 mm film is rather puzzling. Even more damning is the fact that, as Life Magazine had deduced, there were actually six “jiggles” in the Zapruder film, and they only allotted one to a “startle reaction”. (See Josiah Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas, Appendix F) But the point is, this (censored) analysis did not actually support the Commission. It undermined it.
And in more than one way. For Wyckoff and Alvarez placed the first jiggle at around Zapruder frame 190, or a few frames previous to that. As most people who have studied the case know, this would have meant that Oswald would have had to be firing through the branches of an oak tree—which is why the Commission moved this shot up to frame 210. But CBS left themselves an out here. They actually said there was an opening in the tree branches at frame 186, and Oswald could have fired at that point. This is patently ridiculous. The opening at frame 186 lasted for 1/18th of a second. To say that Oswald anticipated a less than split second opening, and then steeled himself in a flash to align the target, aim, and fire—this is all stuff from the realm of comic-book super heroes. Yet, in its blind obeisance to the Warren Report, this is what CBS had reduced itself to.
Another way that CBS tried to aid the Commission was through Wyckoff purchasing five other Bell and Howell movie cameras. (CBS was not allowed to handle the actual Zapruder camera.) The aim was to cast doubt on the accepted speed of the Zapruder camera, and suggest it might have been running slow (so that there would have been more time to get off three shots). The problem was that both the FBI and Bell and Howell had tested the speed of Zapruder’s actual camera, and they both decreed it ran at 18.3 frames per second. Wyckoff proceeded to time these other cameras using the same process that Lyndal Shaneyfelt and Bell and Howell did: by aiming the cameras at a large clock with a second sweep hand, and running them for a determinate number of frames. Wycoff announced the results for these timings as 6.90, 7.30, 6.70, 8.35, and 6.16 seconds. Rather concludes this interview by asking, “So, under this theory, the shooter, or shooters, of the shots could have had up to how many seconds to fire?” And Wyckoff replies, “They could have had, according to this, up [to] as much as eight and thirty-five hundreds [sic] of a second–which is a pretty long time.” (CBS Transcript, Part 1, p. 19) Thompson points out that CBS did not clarify here that they had computed these timings from a run of 128 frames, not 103. In other words, they begged the question concerning frame 186. If they had not played fast and loose with the public, they would have told them that at 18.3 fps, Zapruder’s camera would have run through 128 frames in 6.9 seconds (as opposed to 5.6 for 103 frames), thus making the difference between Zapruder’s camera and the slowest running of the other five considerably less remarkable with respect to the total running time for the supposed three-shot sequence. In fact, Zapruder’s camera seems to be running at an average speed, if one combines the other cameras’ running speeds and divides by five (op. cit., pp. 293-294). As Thompson states, the whole experiment really proves nothing about whether the camera was running slow. Even Dick Salant commented that it was “logically inconclusive and unpersuasive.” But it stayed in the program.
Why did Rather and Wyckoff have to stoop this low? Because of the results of their rifle firing tests. As the critics of the Warren Report had pointed out, the Commission had used two tests to see if Oswald could have gotten off three shots in the allotted 5.6 seconds revealed in the Warren Commission, through the indications on the Zapruder film. These tests ended up failing to prove Oswald could have performed this feat of marksmanship. What made it worse is that the Commission had used very proficient rifleman to try to duplicate what the Commission said Oswald had done. (See Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, p. 108)
So CBS tried again. This time they set up a track with a sled on it to simulate the back of Kennedy’s head. They then elevated a firing point to simulate the sixth floor “sniper’s nest”, released the target on its sled and had a marksman fire his three shots.
In watching the program, a question most naturally arises. CBS had permission to enter the depository building for a significant length of time, because Rather was running around on the sixth floor and down the stairs. In the exterior shots of Rather, it appears that the traffic in Dealey Plaza was roped off. So why didn’t CBS just do the tests right then and there under the exact same circumstances? It would appear to be for two reasons. First, the oak tree would have created an initial obstruction for the first shot. Second, there was a rise on Elm Street that curved the pavement. This was not simulated by CBS.
CBS first tried their experiment in January of 1967. They used a man named Ed Crossman. Crossman had written several books on the subject and many articles. He had a considerable reputation in the field. But his results were not up to snuff—even though CBS had enlarged the target size! And even though they gave him a week to practice with their version of the Mannlicher Carcano rifle. (Again, CBS could not get the actual rifle the Warren Report said was used by Oswald.) In a report filed by Midgley, he related that Crossman never broke 6.25 seconds, and even with the enlarged target, he only got 2 of 3 hits in about 50% of his attempts. Crossman stated that the rifle had a sticky bolt action, and a faulty viewing scope. What the professional sniper did not know is that the actual rifle in evidence was even harder to work. Crossman said that to perform such a feat on the first time out would require a lot of luck.
Since this did not fit the show’s agenda, it was discarded: both the test and the comments. To solve the problem, CBS now decided to call upon an actual football team full of expert riflemen—that is, 11 professional marksmen—who were first allowed to go to an indoor firing range and practice to their heart’s content. Again, this was a major discrepancy with the Warren Report, since there is no such practice time that the Commission could find for Oswald.
The eleven men then took 37 runs at duplicating what Oswald was supposed to have done. There were three instances where 2 out of 3 hits were recorded in 5.6 seconds. The best time was achieved by Howard Donahue—on his third attempt. His first two attempts were complete failures. It is hard to believe, but CBS claimed that their average recorded time was 5.6 seconds. But this did not include the 17 attempts CBS had to throw out because of mechanical failure. And they did not tell the public the surviving average was 1.2 hits out of 3, and with an enlarged target. The truly striking characteristic of these trials was the number of instances where the shooter could not get any result at all. More often than not, once the clip was loaded, the bolt action jammed. The sniper had to realign the target and fire again. According to the Warren Report, that could not have happened with Oswald.
There is one more point about this experiment. Neither at this stage, nor any other, was there any mention of the hit to James Tague. On his one miss, the Warren Commission said that Oswald’s shot hit the curb beneath bystander James Tague. This then bounced up off his face, drawing blood. Perhaps they avoided this because Tague was on a different street than Kennedy and about 260 feet away from the limousine. How could Oswald have missed by that much if he was so accurate on his other two shots? Further, the FBI found no copper on the curb where Tague was hit. This defies credulity, because the ammunition used in the alleged rifle is copper coated. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pp. 228-29) Again, this was surgical-style censorship by CBS.
Related to the ballistics evidence is what CBS did with the medical evidence. The two chief medical witnesses on the program were Dr. Malcolm Perry from Parkland Hospital in Dallas, where Kennedy was taken after he was hit; and James Humes, the chief pathologist at the autopsy examination at Bethesda Medical Center that evening.
In their research for the series, CBS had discovered a document that the Warren Commission did not have. The afternoon of the assassination, Perry had given a press conference along with Dr. Kemp Clark. Although it was filmed, when the Commission asked for a copy or a transcript, the Secret Service said they could not locate either. (Doug Horne, Inside the ARRB, Vol. 2, p. 647) This was a lie. The Secret Service did have such a transcript. It was delivered to them on November 26, 1963. The ARRB found the time-stamped envelope.
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| Robert Pierpont |
But Feinman discovered that CBS had found a copy of this transcript years before. White House correspondent Robert Pierpont found a transcript through the White House press office. One reason it was hard to find was that it should not have been at the White House; it should have been at the Kennedy Library. But as Roger Feinman found out, it had been relabeled. It was not a Kennedy administration press conference anymore; but the first press conference of the Johnson administration. So it ended up at the Johnson Library.
None of this was revealed on the program by either Cronkite or Rather. And neither the tape nor transcript was presented during the series. In fact, Cronkite did his best to camouflage what Perry said during this November 22nd press conference, specifically about the anterior neck wound. Perry clearly said that it had the appearance to him of being an entrance wound. And he said this three times. Cronkite tried to characterize the conference as Perry being rushed out to the press and badgered. Not true, since the press conference was about two hours after Perry had done a tracheotomy over the front neck wound. The performance of that incision had given Perry the closest and most deliberate look at that wound. Perry therefore had the time to recover from the pressure of the operation. And there was no badgering of Perry. Newsmen were simply asking Perry and Clark questions about the wounds they saw. Perry had the opportunity to answer the questions on his own terms. Again, CBS seemed intent on concealing evidence of a second assassin. For Oswald could not have fired at Kennedy from the front.
Commander James Humes did not want to appear on the program. He actually turned down the original CBS request to be interviewed. But Attorney General Ramsey Clark pressured him to appear on the show. (This may have been done with McCloy’s assistance.) As Feinman discovered, the preliminary talks with Humes were done through a friend of his at the church he attended. There were two things that Humes said in these early discussions that were bracing. First, he said that he recalled an x-ray of the president which showed a malleable probe connecting the rear back wound with the front neck wound. Second, he said that he had orders not to do a complete autopsy. He would not reveal who gave him these orders, except to say that it was not Robert Kennedy. (Charles Crenshaw, Trauma Room One, p. 182)
Like the Perry transcript, this was exceedingly interesting information. Concerning the malleable probe, the problem is that no such x-ray depiction exists today. As CBS stated, Humes had been allowed to visit the National Archives and look at the x-rays and photos prior to his appearance. Needless to say, the fact that this x-ray was missing is not mentioned on the program. Because of that, the pubic would have to wait almost 30 years—until the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board—to find out that other witnesses also saw a malleable probe go through Kennedy’s back. But neither pictures nor x-rays of this are in the National Archives today. The difference is that these other witnesses said that the probe did not go through the body, since the wounds did not connect. This may be the reason they are missing today. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pp. 116-18)
On camera, Humes also said that the posterior body wound was at the base of the neck. Dan Rather then showed Humes the drawings made of the wound in the back as depicted by medical illustrator Harold Rydberg for the Warren Commission. This also depicts that wound as being in the neck. Humes agreed with this on camera. And he added that they had reviewed the photos and referred to measurements and this all indicated the wound was in the neck.
Even for CBS, and John McCloy, this is surprising. In the first place, the autopsy photos do not reveal the wound to be at the base of the neck. It is clearly in the back. (Click here and scroll down) The best that one can say for CBS is that, apparently, they did not send anyone with Humes to visit the archives. Which is kind of puzzling, since good journalistic practice would necessitate two witnesses to such an important assertion. And beyond that, CBS should have sent its own independent expert, because Humes clearly had a vested interest in seeing his autopsy report bolstered, especially since it was under attack by more than one critic.
The second point that makes Humes’ interview surprising is his comments on the Rydberg drawings’ accuracy. These do not coincide with what Mr. Rydberg said later. To this day, Rydberg does not understand why he was chosen to make these drawings for the Commission. Rydberg was only 22 at the time, and had been drawing for only one year. There were many other veteran illustrators in the area whom the Commission could have called upon. But Rydberg came to believe that it was his very inexperience that caused the Commission to direct the doctors to him. For when Humes and Dr. Thornton Boswell appeared before him, they had nothing with them: no photos, no x-rays, no official measurements. Everything they told him was from memory. And this was nearly four months after the autopsy. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pp. 119-22) The Rydberg drawings have become almost infamous for not corresponding to the pictures, measurements, or the Zapruder film. For Humes to endorse these on national television, and for CBS to allow this without any fact checking—this shows what a National Security project the special had become. In fact, the Justice Department had scripted the Humes/Rather interview in advance. (ibid, pp. 125-26)
As noted, CBS also knew that Humes said that he had been limited in his autopsy pathology for the Kennedy autopsy. This would have been another powerful scoop if CBS had followed it up. Since they did not, the public had to wait another two years for the story to surface. This time it was at the trial of Clay Shaw in New Orleans, when autopsy doctor Pierre Finck took the stand in Shaw’s defense. Finck said the same thing: that Dr. Humes was limited in what autopsy procedures he was permitted to follow on Kennedy (ibid, p. 115). This story would have had much more exposure and vibrancy if CBS had broken it, because the press bias against Garrison was very restrictive and controlling. But, as we have seen, the Justice Department control over Humes and CBS was also restrictive—the difference being that CBS was a much more powerful institutional entity than the rather small DA’s office of a medium sized city.
What CBS did with the Humes/RFK story should be followed up on to show just how badly CBS was willing to mangle the truth.
In early 1975, when the JFK case was heating up again, Sixty Minutes decided to do a story on whether or not Jack Ruby and Lee Oswald knew each other. After several months of research, Salant killed the project. Those investigative files were turned over to Les Midgley, and became the basis for the 1975 CBS special, which was entitled The American Assassins. Originally this was planned as a four-night special: one night each on the JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King and the George Wallace shootings. But at the last moment, in a very late press release, CBS announced that the first two nights would be devoted to the JFK case. Midgley was the producer, but this time Cronkite was absent. Rather took his place behind the desk.
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| Franklin Lindsay |
In general terms, it was more of the same. The photographic consultant was Itek Corporation, a company that was very close to the CIA. In fact, they helped build the CORONA spy satellite system. Their CEO in the mid-Sixties, Franklin Lindsay, was actually a former CIA officer. With Itek’s help, CBS did everything they could to move up their Magic Bullet shot from about frame 190 to about frames 223-226. Yet Josiah Thompson, who appeared on the show, had written there was no evidence Governor Connally was hit before frames 230-236. Moreover, there are indications that President Kennedy is clearly hit as he disappears behind the Stemmons Freeway sign at about frame 190: his head seems to collapse both sideways and forward in a buckling motion. But with Itek in hand, this now became the scenario for the CBS version of the Single Bullet Theory. It differed from the Warren Commission’s in that it did not rely upon a “delayed reaction” on Connally’s part to the same bullet.
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| Milton Helpern |
CBS also employed Alfred Olivier. Olivier was a research veterinarian who worked for the Army wound ballistics branch and did tests with the alleged rifle used in the assassination. He was a chief witness for junior counsel Arlen Specter before the Warren Commission. (See Warren Commission, Volume V, pp. 74ff.) For CBS in 1975, Olivier said that the Magic Bullet, CE399 was not actually “pristine”. For CBS and Dan Rather, this makes the Single Bullet Theory not impossible but just hard to believe. Therefore, it could have happened. Apparently, no one explained to Rather that the only deformation on the bullet is a slight flattening at the base, which would occur as the bullet is blasted through the barrel of a rifle. There is no deformation at its tip. And there is only a tiny amount of mass missing from the bullet. In other words, as more than one author has written, it has all the indications of being fired into a carton of water or a bale of cotton. And if CBS had interviewed the legendary medical examiner Milton Helpern of New York, that is pretty much what they would have heard. (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 69) It is odd they did not do so, since CBS Headquarters is in New York, and Helpern was still alive in 1975.
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| James Weston |
As we have seen, Dr. James Weston would be the on camera medical witness in 1975. Both Weston and Lattimer had seen the medical exhibits before the show was filmed. Taking that into consideration, what they said is not surprising; it is what they left out that is. Predictably, Weston said that there were only two shots, both from the rear. Yet Weston makes no mention of the brain being missing, a fact that both he and Lattimer had to know. Without that exhibit, there was no proof of the brain being sectioned, which is the standard procedure for tracking bullets inside the skull. If this was not done, there is no proof of directionality. Further, there was no mention of the new feature to the x-rays that was found in a Justice Department review in 1968: this was a disk-shaped 6.5 mm fragment in the rear of the skull. Its size fits perfectly the ammunition caliber of the Mannlicher Carcano rifle. It was not seen the night of the autopsy by any of the pathologists. Third, in that same Justice Department review, particle fragments Humes described in his report as going upward from the entry wound, low in the back of the skull, had disappeared on the x-ray. Weston mentioned none of these changes in the evidence. One wonders if he actually read the autopsy report, or just relied on his briefing by Lattimer.
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| George Burkley |
Finally, Rather realizes, without being explicit, that something was wrong with Kennedy’s autopsy. He actually said to the audience that the autopsy was below par. And he also reversed field on his opinion of Humes. After praising his experience in 1967, Rather now says that neither Humes nor Boswell were actually qualified to perform Kennedy’s autopsy, and that certain things were actually botched. In other words, what Humes told CBS through a third party in 1967 was accurate. But, in contradiction to Humes’ denial that it was Bobby Kennedy who did so, Rather claims that it was Kennedy physician George Burkley who actually controlled the autopsy. Burkley could not have done any such thing unless it was approved by RFK. And Robert Kennedy had given orders to do a full autopsy. That same order was co-signed by Burkley. (Crenshaw, ibid, p. 182) In this author’s opinion, this piece of disinformation sounds like it was created by Lattimer.
In its perniciousness, in its “blame the victims” theme, Rather’s comment echoes what John McCloy said to Cronkite on camera in 1967. McCloy said that if the Commission made a mistake, it was in not demanding the autopsy materials for their examination, adding that these were under the control of the Kennedy family. If anything shows how “in the tank” CBS and Cronkite were to McCloy, this exchange does. First of all, the medical exhibits were not in control of the Kennedys in 1964. They were under control of the Secret Service that year. Secondly, the Commission did have these exhibits. And McCloy had to have known that. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 171)
Let us make no mistake about what CBS was up to here. The entire corporate upper structure—Salant, Stanton, Paley—had completely overrun the lower management types like Midgley, Manning and Schorr. And the lower managers decided not to utter a peep to the outside world about what had happened. There was only one recorded instance where CBS let on to how they had fixed their proceedings. In 1993, CBS did another special endorsing the Warren Report. This time, as in 1975, Rather was the host. He called both Bob Tanenbaum of the HSCA, and David Belin of the Warren Commission, to Dealey Plaza. They both discussed their differing views of the case. But Tanenbaum stated that, unlike, Belin, he had tried well over a hundred felony cases through to verdict. Evidently, Rather was impressed with Tanenbaum’s honesty and experience. When the camera was off, Rather stated quietly to the former prosecutor: “We really blew it on the JFK case.”
Not only Cronkite and Rather participated in this appalling exercise; so too did Eric Sevareid. He appeared at the end of the last show and said that there are always those who believe in conspiracies, whether it be about Yalta, China, or Pearl Harbor. He then poured it on and said some of these people still think Hitler is alive. He concluded by sneering that, anyway, it would be utterly impossible to cover up such a thing. (Watch it here)
No it would not Eric. You, your network, and your cohorts just gave us an object lesson in how to do it. Only Roger Feinman, who was not at the top, or anywhere near it, had the guts to try and get to the bottom of the whole internal scandal. And he got thrown under the bus for trying. In that valiant but doomed effort, he showed what hypocrites the top dogs at CBS were, how easily they were cowed and cajoled by their bosses. Everyone then took the Mafia vow of silence about what they had done. Which is despicable, but considering the magnitude of the crime they committed, also understandable.
(This essay is largely based on the script for the documentary film Roger Feinman was in the process of re-editing at the time of his death in 2011. The reader can view that here)
The author has been informed by Josiah Thompson that the deception by CBS went even further than Roger Feinman knew. CBS line producer Bob Richter revealed some fascinating information to author Thompson after the 1967 special was broadcast. CBS stated for the internal record that many of their rifle attempts were faulty since the weapon jammed or malfunctioned. Thus was not the case. This misreporting deliberately concealed the fact that in the majority of those instances, the marksman just could not duplicate what the Commission said Oswald did. CBS simply did not want to admit those failures, and add them to the ones they did admit to. (04/26/2017)
Thanks to the efforts of Pat Speer, some of Roger’s documentation can again be examined. The hard-to-find reproductions can be found at Pat’s’ website. These are screenshots taken from a copy of Roger’s original PowerPoint presentation. For this reason, a few of them are unfortunately legible only with difficulty. But the reader will see that they represent in substance the story recounted here. We are grateful to Pat for making these available.
I finally understood the influence and reputation that the late Mark Lane had in America when I arrived in Pittsburgh for the Cyril Wecht Symposium at Duquesne in the fall of 2013. At the airport, I was picked up in a private car and driven to my hotel. The driver asked me what I was in town for. I replied a JFK conference on the 50th Anniversary at Duquesne. He asked me if Mark Lane was going to be there. I said yes he was. He replied that he wrote his first research paper back in college many years ago on the JFK case, and he used a lot of the work of Lane in doing it. He asked me to thank Lane for that inspiration. When I arrived at the hotel, I did see Mark and I conveyed the debt of gratitude from my driver.
After I did so I went up to my room and thought: Geez, there must be literally tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people across America who feel that way about Lane. For the simple reason that Lane was literally the prime mover in the dissent movement against the official version of the Kennedy assassination. Within just three weeks of Kennedy’s death, Lane had issued the first legal arguments against the public stampede to condemn the memory of the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been shot and killed by Jack Ruby while in the custody of the Dallas police. Lane wanted to publish his defendant’s brief in The Nation. But that liberal journal—and several other periodicals– would not accept it. So he went to the even more leftist journal The National Guardian.
At that conference in Pittsburgh, there were a few copies of that original essay on a coffee table. Lane picked one up and said to me, “They had to print several reprints of this issue. They eventually sold a hundred thousand of them.” This was in mid-December of 1963, two weeks after the first meeting of the Warren Commission, when every major media outlet in America was accommodating leaks from people like Jerry Ford, J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles about how compelling the case against Oswald was. But there was Mark Lane, the one attorney standing up for a dead man who was being walked over by every public and private institution in America.
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Marguerite Oswald, mother of the murdered suspect, heard about Lane’s polemic. She wanted him to act as her murdered son’s defense advocate. But the Warren Commission would not allow it. When Lane forwarded his request to the Commission, Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin wired back to him the following message: “The Commission does not believe that it would be useful or desirable to permit an attorney representing Lee Harvey Oswald to have access to the investigative materials within the possession of the Commission or to participate in any hearings to be conducted by the Commission.” (See Lane’s A Citizen’s Dissent, e-book version, Part 2, “The Great Silence.”)
In fact, one of the many travesties of the Commission was that Oswald was not granted counsel throughout the ten-month legal procedure. In that respect, the proceeding was a runaway prosecution. Lane was allowed to appear before the Commission twice, once in March and once in July. These were clearly token, adversarial appearances. In fact, it is hard to find another witness who the Commission treated with such hostility. (Walt Brown, The Warren Omission, pgs. 243-45)
At around this time in 1964, Lane began to be surveilled by the FBI. Because he was doing JFK lectures abroad, he was also placed on the federal government’s “lookout list” for international air travel. Whenever Lane returned from abroad, the FBI was alerted he was back. (See Lane, op. cit) But beyond that, the FBI now began to interview certain radio hosts who had chosen to place Lane on the air. These Bureau visits resulted in Lane being banned from certain media outlets. And the buzz about those visits discouraged other outlets from having him on.
In spite of his other considerable achievements, Mark Lane will be forever linked to the JFK assassination. He was, quite literally, a pioneer, a trailblazer in the wilderness.
But Lane would not let up in his defense of Oswald. He then rented a theater in New York City and began to lecture there regularly, taking apart the evidence presented by the developing official story. With the funds attained by these talks, and his various lectures at home and abroad, Lane set up a Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry to collect evidence ignored by the FBI and the Warren Commission. Lane actually managed to appear on some rather widely distributed talk programs, like the one hosted by Merv Griffin.
He then began writing a book based upon the Warren Report and its accompanying 26 volumes of evidence. He could not find a publisher for his book in America. Therefore, Rush to Judgment was first published in England in 1966. It became so successful that it was later published in the U.S. and became a smashing bestseller. At a lecture at the 40th anniversary of Kennedy’s death, Lane said he later found out that the reason he could not find a domestic publisher was that the FBI was visiting publishing houses and discouraging them from publishing his work.
In 1967, Lane followed Rush to Judgment with a documentary film of the same title. This production was shot by famous film-maker Emile de Antonio. De Antonio made films on several controversial subjects like the demagogue Joseph McCarthy and the Vietnam War. He later said that in his entire career, he never met as many witnesses who were literally afraid for their lives to go on camera. Lane literally had to plead with and cajole people to come out of their homes. A few years after this documentary film, Lane worked on the story for a fictional film about the JFK case called “Executive Action.” That film was released in 1973. It was directed by the veteran David Miller and featured some famous leading actors like Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, and Will Geer.
In 1967, Lane had worked for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison during his two-year inquiry into the JFK case. Around 1975, after both the revelations of the Church Committee and the ABC showing of the Zapruder film had ignited outrage favoring a new investigation, Lane did two things to further that interest. First, he released a new documentary on the JFK case called “Two Men in Dallas,” featuring local sheriff’s officer Roger Craig. Second, he restarted his grass roots Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry. He used that committee to lobby Congress to pass a resolution to reopen the Kennedy murder case. To put it mildly, Lane did not get along very well with the final Chief Counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations Robert Blakey.
In the 1980’s, Lane decided to take on the appeal of a libel verdict against publisher Willis Carto, the Liberty Lobby and their controversial publication Spotlight. In 1981, Liberty Lobby had lost a $650,000 case judgment when Victor Marchetti had written in Spotlight that the CIA had to devise an alibi for their agent Howard Hunt being in Dallas on November 22, 1963. (Lane, Plausible Denial, pgs. 129-32) Through the help of his volunteer network and some fine sleuthing, Lane discovered that such a memo did exist. It had been prepared by CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton, and had been seen by journalist Joe Trento. And Trento had actually written about it. (ibid, pgs. 152-55) By his aggressive defense, Lane not only reversed the judgment, he actually convinced some of the jurors that the CIA was involved in the Kennedy assassination. (ibid, pgs. 320-323)
Lane wrote a book on the Howard Hunt case that was published in 1991. Called Plausible Denial, that book also became a best seller. It gave us harsh insights into CIA officers Hunt, Angleton, Richard Helms and David Phillips. Concerning the last, during a debate with Lane, Phillips actually said that when the entire record was declassified, there would be no evidence that Oswald was ever at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. (ibid, pgs. 75-87)
But that still wasn’t enough for Lane. In the new millennium, Lane published his final book on the JFK case called, eponymously, Last Word. In this book, Lane brought out another aspect of the case: the possible complicity of the Secret Service in the assassination. That book was promoted by various video trailers, during which Lane interviewed luminaries like former HSCA Deputy Counsel Robert Tanenbaum, film director Oliver Stone, and former Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden.
But the amazing thing about Lane is that there were still other aspects of his legal career, outside of the JFK case, that I have not even mentioned. For instance, for a time in the seventies, Lane served as attorney for the accused assassin of Martin Luther King, James Earl Ray. He also co-wrote a book on the King case with Dick Gregory called Code Name Zorro. Lane also took on the case of James Richardson. Richardson was a black man in the south who was indicted and convicted of killing his seven children. Through some extraordinary detective work—and with help from Gregory and Garrison assistant Steve Jaffe—Lane had Richardson freed after 21 years of unjust incarceration. He then wrote a book on that case called Arcadia. His book about the riotous—and ruinous—Chicago Democratic convention, called Chicago Eyewitness, makes for an interesting journal. Lane’s reports on this shocking event make it the ultimate crushing of youthful dissent in America and a turning point in history—which it was. In 2012 he summed up his tumultuous career with an autobiography called Citizen Lane. (Visit Lane’s website for information on how to get Lane’s books.)
In spite of his other considerable achievements, Mark Lane will be forever linked to the JFK assassination. He was, quite literally, a pioneer, a trailblazer in the wilderness. In that dark year of 1964 when the Warren Commission was trying to keep everything quiet, while men like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover were leaking rigged and false evidence to the papers, there was Mark Lane, speaking from his podium each night, to anyone who would listen.. He did this not just because it was his vocation, but because he had personally met President Kennedy when he was running for office in New York. Therefore, he kept up that crusade for the truth about Kennedy’s murder at a very high cost to himself.
As he wrote in his 1968 book A Citizen’s Dissent, he lost his one corporate client over the JFK case. He was then vilified by his opponents who seemed to have easy access to the press, which Lane did not come close to having. Warren Commission junior counsel Wesley Liebeler was actually going to run against him for his state legislative seat. Through it all, through his over more than five decades of dissent against the folly of the Warren Commission, Mark Lane never lost his fighting spirit or his dedication to his cause. He liked to say that the folly of the Commission had led to a national tragedy. Which it did. For both him and all of us.
Lane died at age 89 at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, May 10. 2016. We are all a bit poorer for his passing. It signifies a milestone. Taps at Reveille.
~ Jim DiEugenio
For more remembrances of Mark Lane from Cyril Wecht, Bob Tanenbaum, Don Freed, Steve Jaffe, David Lifton, Joan Mellen, Joe McBride and John Barbour, listen to the BlackOp Radio installment below:
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The location of Kennedy’s back wound is a major obstacle for the Single Bullet Theory (SBT). It is the first of several dots that needed to be connected – all at a downward angle: (1) the alleged sniper’s nest, (2) the back wound, (3) the throat wound, (4) Governor’s Connally’s back wound (the exit in the front is not questioned), and (5) his wrist wound.
Shall I burden the SBT with yet one more dot? (6) The little fragment that ended up in Connally’s thigh not far beneath the skin – and the mysteriously large, 10 mm, round, corresponding hole in his pant leg.
The back wound was just too low. If the bullet actually went through JFK’s torso and exited his throat – it would have done so at an upward angle. For that bullet to have reached Connally’s pants, he would need to have lifted his leg rather high in the air, above his seat.
I doubt that even John Lattimer could have found a way to show that on the Zapruder film. (But who knows what went on when the president’s car went behind the Stemmons sign? Maybe Dale Myers could do another study, proving that Connally did raise his leg high above the seat while the car was out of sight.)
Lattimer found a way to raise Kennedy’s back wound, up, up, up – all the way to the sixth cervical vertebra (C-6), a tremendous feat.
In 1977, he published a paper (1) in which he claimed the movements of Kennedy’s arms and hands – he seems to be trying to grab his throat – are symptoms of damage at the C-6 level. To give this paper more authority, he put the names of two other prominent doctors on it: Edward Schlesinger, a neurosurgeon, and H. Houston Merritt, a neurologist. He wrote:
“The precision with which the signs of a spinal cord lesion fit with the other evidence (loose fragments) that the tip of the transverse process of C-6 (not C-5 or C-7) had been struck by the bullet … ” (p. 287)
To prove it, the authors cited a nineteenth century paper (2) on a patient treated by neurologist William Thorburn, a patient who fell backwards, and was found with his arms in a strange, unnatural position, a position that was, presumably, similar to Kennedy’s. The paper was illustrated with an elegant drawing of the Thorburn patient. Lattimer’s caption read:
“Fig. 4. Illustration from William Thorburn’s original article … showing the peculiar position assumed by the elbows immediately after an injury at the level of C-6 … ”
Years later, the back wound apparently moved downward a bit. In his 1993 paper (3) in the Journal of the AMA, Lattimer repeats some of his earlier claims, but instead of asserting the lesion was at the C-6 level, he said it was in “a vertebra in the lower portion of his neck.” But he continued to make false statements in comparing Kennedy to the Thorburn patient.
“Finally, by frame 236, President Kennedy has assumed the reflex position illustrated by Thorburn almost 100 years ago … ” (p. 1545)
But Thorburn wrote of his patient,
“ … the elbows were flexed, the shoulder abducted and rotated outward, and the hands and arms fell into the position indicated in the annexed engraving … ” (p. 511).
According to the Zapruder film, Kennedy’s shoulders were never abducted (rotated outward). They were adducted (rotated inward)
There are several things wrong with this paper:
I called Dr. Schlesinger and questioned him. At first he made a half-hearted attempt to defend the paper. But as I persisted in pointing out the glaring discrepancies – he suddenly confessed he had never even seen the Zapruder film. Nor had he read the paper that Lattimer had finally published. (This isn’t especially suspicious or unusual. Doctors have put my own name on papers that I have not read. But it was a great mistake to trust a doctor like John Lattimer.) The following comments reveal the depth of his involvement:
“I’ve never seen it (the Zapruder film) … I had conversations with Dr. Lattimer about it and told him to look into the Thorburn business … I wasn’t consulted when it was written … when he wrote a paper about it, I found that it was neurologically unsophisticated, and so I told him about the possibilities … ” (Schlesinger, 1995)
Dr. Schlesinger gave me one last bit of information. It concerned the distinguished neurologist, H. Houston Merritt, M.D., whose name was also on the paper:
“And Merritt had nothing to do with it. Nothing.” (Schlesinger, 1995)
I described this interview to Dr. Richard A.R. Fraser, a neurosurgeon who was at the New York Hospital – Cornell Center. He listened to the tape, recognized the voice of his old friend and colleague, and called him up to discuss it. Dr. Schlesinger confessed to him that when I called, he was in his backyard having a cocktail. Apparently, he felt foolish.